URLs du Jour

There are two theories about why hurting the wealthy would help
everybody else. The first is the economically illiterate zero-sum
proposition that there exists in the world a bucket marked “Income” and that some force in society — some combination of government, Chamber of Commerce, and that little Monopoly guy in the top hat and monocle — goes around ladling out income while the world’s workers and investors gaze up at them pleadingly like so many hatchlings with their beaks agape. That is not how wealth works. Jeff Bezos did not become the world’s wealthiest man by going around and picking people’s pockets a nickel at a time; he and his colleagues created something in Amazon, something that has real value. If they hadn’t done so, the thing that they created simply would not exist. The sum of good things in the world grows greater through economic production; it is not simply a shifting of resources, taking a coin out of one pocket and putting it in another. This is another occasion upon which to be mindful of the paradise of the real. Money is just a record-keeping system only indirectly related to the vast bounty of actual goods and services, which is why a middle-class American in 2019 eats better than Louis XVI and sleeps in more comfortable quarters than did Marie Antoinette or Akbar.

If the rich were radically less rich, the poor and the middle class would, at best, still be where they are. In some ways, they’d almost certainly be worse off: A disproportionate share of U.S. economic growth, wage growth, and employment growth has been driven by a relatively small number of startup companies. As Vivek Wadhwa of Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program put it: “Without startups, there would be no net job growth in the U.S. economy.” Technology startups are driven by venture capital, and venture capital is a rich man’s game. The “PayPal mafia” — the group of young entrepreneurs who got rich from that startup — went on to form Tesla, LinkedIn, Palantir, SpaceX, Yelp, YouTube, and others. Their investments helped build Facebook, Spotify, Lyft, and Airbnb, among others. Startup-heavy California has 12 percent of the U.S. population but accounts for 16 percent of its job growth and 14.2 percent of its economic output. Nobody wants to hear it, but inequality is part of what makes that happen.

The other argument: the rich have a disproportionate share of
political power. Click through for why KDW says:
"There is a little something to that, but less than you might think."

[…] the first thing to understand when contemplating how to fix America’s fiscal problems is that tax revenues, according to the new CBO numbers, are going to increase by an average of nearly 5 percent annually over the next 10 years. And that means receipts will be more than $2.1 trillion higher in 2029 than they are in 2019.

And since this year’s deficit is projected to be “only” $897 billion, that presumably means that it shouldn’t be that difficult to balance the budget.

And mathematically, it's not. Daniel shows that if spending
increases by 1% annually, the budget would balance by 2026.
Too draconian? Increasing spending by 2% annually, and the budget
balances in 2027, a year later. And a 2.5% annual spending increase
gets you to balance in 2029.

Gotcha: this includes cutting back on the growth of entitlements. So
balancing the budget is mathematically easy, but politically… I
don't know. Impossible or just unlikely?

There are three things to note about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax. The first is that it won’t do what she promises. The second is that it won’t happen. And the third is that both of those cavils are almost beside the point.

The Massachusetts Democrat wants to tax fortunes greater than $50 million at a rate of 2 percent of assets a year, with billionaires kicking in an additional 1 percent. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman estimate that the tax would raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years, all from people most voters don’t like very well.

Click through for the details, but Megan's bottom line is that Warren's
proposal is political theater, boob bait for the Progressive bubbas.

5. Bleeding-heart rhetoric is disguised hate speech. When activists blame the bourgeoisie for causing hunger, disease, and illiteracy, perhaps their main concern isn’t actually alleviating hunger, disease, or illiteracy. While they’d like these problems to disappear, the bleeding hearts’ top priority could be making the bourgeoisie suffer. The mailed fist systematizes that suffering.

It’s tempting to dismiss this story as cartoonish, but it’s more plausible than you think. Human beings often resent first – and rationalize said resentment later. They’re also loathe to admit this ugly fact. Actions, however, speak louder than words. People like Chavez and Maduro can accept their failure to help the poor, but not their failure to crush their hated enemies.

For some reason, I thought it appropriate to put this after the
links to Kevin, Daniel, and Megan.

To understand fully why the “toxic masculinity” concept is pernicious and not, as proponents would have us think, a helpful corrective to male malfeasance, consider that it is based on several related and erroneous premises. The first is a Blank Slate theory of sexual identity, the idea that men and women have no inborn preferences, interests, and urges that might reveal themselves in different kinds of behavior. Instead, it’s society—or, rather, patriarchy—that writes instructions on the human tabula rasa about the right way to be female or male. Those rules are designed for the benefit of the powerful, namely white males, and are completely separate from biology.

The Blank Slate theory then leads to a second error. To explain why men are in fact more likely to, say, assault their landlord or, less dramatically, to stare at a woman’s breasts without allowing for innate tendencies, blank slatists have to paint a garishly degraded picture of American society and its supposedly pathological gender norms. Only toxic elders passing on the rules of a vicious, woman-hating society can account for the existence of rapists, cat-callers, bullies—and those Covington Catholic boys.

Take it from the horse's mouth: guys can be jerks, and worse. And
(fine) attribute that to "masculinity" if you want.

But "masculinity" is also what caused
Benjamin
Keefe Clark to help a woman in a wheelchair on the 78th floor of
the south tower of the World Trade Center. Something to think about.

Overcharged

Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care

This book is published by Cato, and written by two lawprofs: David Hyman
(from Georgetown) and Charles Silver (University of Texas).
The Kindle version is a mere $1.99 at Amazon. Incredible
deal. Downside: it's very, very long: print version is 592 pages.
Although the last 20% or so of the book is devoted to footnotes.

My immediate take:
It's a good remedy for people who are advocating "Medicare for All".
After reading this, you'll be saying (if you weren't already): Are
those people out of their freaking minds? Because Medicare is
seriously broken, rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. Maybe we should fix it
first, before extending its breakage to the entire populace?

Yes, Medicare is "popular". Which is why Democrats find "Medicare for All"
to be a winning slogan. But the authors show why it's popular: it
doesn't ask too many inconvenient questions before shelling out huge
sums of cash. Its income is silently deducted away in people's paystubs.
And politicians love it because they get to run it and take credit for
keeping the goodies flowing. Of course, as New
Hampshire's own
Drew
Cline points out: it's due to run out of money in a few years, and
politicians are diligently ignoring that problem. (One guy who wasn't:
Paul Ryan. For his troubles, now an ex-Congressman.)

But it's not just Medicare, pretty much the entire market for health care is
dysfunctional. The authors recite one horror story after another,
showing how terrible things are. Most of the problem is due to the
nature of third-party payments, where consumers are insulated from
normal market price signals. The system can
corrupt even honest people, who can hardly be blamed for responding to
the incentives it presents. (People do so with varying degrees of
eagerness, of course.)

The authors also have a bone to pick with "Big Pharma", which uses all
the tricks in the patent book to protect its fat profits. The stories
here
might have you nodding in agreement with Bernie Sanders. The authors
have some ideas about reforming the patent system for life-saving drugs,
which may work. (Unfortunately, a lot of pols seem to be in Big
Pharma's pocket, and those that aren't seem to be more interested in
using the industry as a whipping boy for their own political gain, not

The authors are (surprisingly) optimistic about the future; they have
visions that an increasingly expensive and inefficient market will give
rise to more and more "retail" medicine, more medical tourism, and
cheap insurance against "catastrophic" medical costs.

That would be nice, but I'm less optimistic when nearly all the
politicians and all the mainstream media have bought into the narrative
that's brought us to the current dreadfulness.

Anyway: an interesting (albeit anger-provoking) read, and (as said) a
very good deal via Kindle.

Listen, it wouldn’t be fair to accuse presidential hopeful Kamala Harris of supporting state control over the means of all production. To this point she’s only focused on the energy, health care, auto-manufacturing and education sectors. Good candidates prioritize.

In this age of hyperbole, I sometimes worry about overusing words like “socialist” or “authoritarian.” Yet, if we accept that an “authoritarian” is a person “who favors or enforces strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom,” I’m not sure how anyone watching Harris’ campaign kick-off (sponsored by CNN!) could argue that her policy positions do not fit that description.

For starters, here are some of the things that Harris believes the state can ban at expense of your personal freedom: private health insurance, your car, affordable energy, political speech, your guns, for-profit colleges, and government office holding for practicing Catholics. Of course, the media, complicit in normalizing these hard-left positions over the past decade, treat her agenda as the centrist option for voters. Who knows? Maybe in the contemporary Democratic Party it is.

Can't wait for President Kamala!

At National Review, Charles C.W. Cooke is pretty irked with
the
Bad, Press.

Our national press is a national joke. Vain, languid, excitable,
morbid, duplicitous, cheap, insular, mawkish, and possessed of a
chronic self-obsession that would have made Dorian Gray blush, it
rambles around the United States in neon pants, demanding
congratulation for its travails. Not since Florence Foster Jenkins
have Americans been treated to such an excruciating example of
self-delusion. The most vocal among the press corps’ ranks cast
themselves openly as “firefighters” when, at worst, they are
pyromaniacs and, at best, they are obsequious asbestos salesmen.
“You never get it right, do you?” Sybil Fawlty told Basil in
Fawlty Towers. “You’re either crawling all over them licking
their boots or spitting poison at them like some Benzedrine puff
adder.” There is a great deal of space between apologist and bête
noire. In the newsrooms of America, that space is empty.

If you get into the habit of presuming any single news report
reflecting poorly on the right is false, you'll save yourself a lot
of backtracking.

To understand whether wealth tax rates are high or low, it is helpful to convert them into equivalent income tax rates, which are more familiar and easier to understand. Consider a taxpayer who holds a long term bond with a fixed interest rate of 3 percent each year. Because a 2 percent wealth tax captures 67 percent of the interest income of the bondholder makes each year, it is essentially identical to a 67 percent income tax. The proposed tax raises the same revenue and has the same economic effects, whether it is called a 2 percent wealth tax or a 67 percent income tax.

A 67 percent income tax is clearly a high tax rate. The tax rate is no less high when it is relabeled as a 2 percent wealth tax each year. Changing labels does not change reality. The 3 percent wealth tax that Warren has proposed for billionaires is still higher, equivalent to a 100 percent income tax rate in this example. The total tax burden is even greater because the wealth tax would be imposed on top of the 37 percent income tax rate.

Put that way, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Put any way, it
doesn't make a lot of sense. It's not designed to make sense;
it's designed to appeal to naked envy and resentment, of which
Liz hopes there's enough in the electorate to put her into power.

My own sense is that the best moral defense of billionaires requires putting the socialists on the defensive by answering the billionaire question with some other questions. Would it be moral for politicians in Washington to change the laws so that becoming a billionaire in America would be impossible, no matter how much value an entrepreneur creates for customers and shareholders and society as a result of the entrepreneur's hard work, genius, and risk-raking? What would that proposed alternative system do to the American dream and to its traditions of strong property rights? Why scapegoat and demonize a few billionaires for public health problems in Alabama that they have nothing to do with?

Won't we be more likely to make progress against poverty and disease if we avoid divisively linking those problems to the existence of a few rich people who aren't actually at fault for them? Is it a "moral world" where politicians can motivate millions of voters to blame a country's problem on a handful of wealthy individuals, and to suggest, without evidence, that long-term and intractable problems can be quickly solved if only tax rates were dramatically increased? Is the Democratic fixation with the billionaires (problem) and taxes (solution) much different from the Trump fixation on immigrants and the border wall?

Even some of the better educated of my lefty Facebook friends buy
into the "poor people are poor because rich people are rich" meme.
Sad!

Cato
points to
SpendingTracker.org, a
site which "assigns each member of Congress a spending score by
matching voting records to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scores
for every bill affecting spending since 2009."

Very cool. But for New Hampshire folks, it's sad, because all
current/recent members from NH have scores in the "high" ($19 trillion) range.
And there are a lot of members, I think all Democrats, in that ballpark.

Some highlights:

The lowest-spending Representative in the 115th Congress (and over his lifetime) was Michigan’s Justin Amash, who voted to cut roughly $165 billion during the 115th Congress. Nearly tied with Amash was Kentucky’s Thomas Massie.

Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee each voted to cut over $150 billion during the 115th Congress, with Rand Paul as the lowest-spending Senator. Surprisingly, democratic socialist Bernie Sanders voted to increase spending by the fourth-lowest amount, roughly $140 billion. By comparison, Republican Senator Marco Rubio voted for a net spending increase of roughly $330 billion, more than twice as much as Sanders.

Rubio a bigger spender than Sanders? Hm. (My guess: it's because
Sanders votes against a lot of Defense appropriations.)

The Perfectionists

How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

An interesting, somewhat quirky, history of technological progress
viewed through the lens of the concept of precision: how things
are manufactured just so the myriad pieces fit together just
right, and everything just works. It's probably an
underappreciated story, especially if you've ever tried to put something
together yourself, and … yeah, my talents are not in that area at all.

It's a collection of interesting stories, roughly in chronological
order; they don't exhaust the topic, but that's OK. The author, Simon
Winchester, is a journalist, and has a good eye for the interesting
detail, the flamboyant personality, the quiet heroism involved in
"getting it right".

Topics discussed, among many: the Antikythera device (amazingly precise,
totally inaccurate); locks and keys; mass production of personal weaponry; the different
approaches to car manufacturing taken by Rolls-Royce and Ford; the
near-disaster of the Hubble Space Telescope and its heroic rescue;
clocks and watches; integrated circuits;
the progress of metrology, defining standards of mass, length, and time.

And probably the most precise piece of equipment in history: the LIGO
gravity wave detector.

It's all written well, and, if you're interested in technology at all,
pretty darn gripping.

No tech expertise is assumed of the reader. In fact the one bit of math
is botched; Winchester says (p. 349) that a simple pendulum's period is
given by the formula

Some people go out looking for identity politics. Others have it thrust upon them.

The latter is the case with the defamed students — the children — of Covington Catholic, who have, thanks to the phantasmagoric alchemy of the progressive imagination, have been born again as stand-ins for . . . only everything progressives hate: “white privilege,” “patriarchy,” Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, kids who were mean to them in high school, etc. That so much of the progressive-media discourse on the Covington episode consisted of the emotional revisitation of petty (and some unpetty) childhood traumas has given the whole project a Freudian odor, and, like the work of Sigmund Freud himself, it consists largely of intellectual fraud bolstered by manufactured or distorted evidence — claims of fact that are said to speak to a higher metaphysical truth no matter how frequently and how thoroughly they are debunked as claims of fact.

Among my lefty Facebook friends, only one sort of apologized for
their original too-hot
takes. (Hi, Ann!) A few doubled down on "smirk boy." Interesting.
Sad.

We’re the first-in-the-nation state that boasts “Live Free or
Die” as our motto, but you wouldn’t know it from the state of our voting districts. Partisan gerrymandering across New Hampshire is an affront to democracy and the values we as Granite Staters hold dear. It’s long past time we fix our district lines, and an independent redistricting commission is the only way forward.

The usual gripe: Democrats are mostly concerned about
"gerrymandering" when it's done by Republicans.

Marjorie's major bit of gerryevidence is the "salamander" shape of
Executive
Council District 2, which runs from the southwest corner of the
state, meanders up to Concord, then stretches a thin tentacle over
to Rollinsford/Dover/Durham. (Hey, that's me!)

Arguably, it's what's left over after mapping out districts 1, 3, 4,
and 5, all of which seem relatively compact. Also interestingly,
its current councilor is Andru Volinsky, Democrat. (There are
currently three D councilors, 2 Rs.)

I love New Hampshire. Spent a lot of time in the Granite State as
a kid, vacationing at Lake Sunapee. My oldest son was born there,
and I still have relatives who live there, including one of my
brothers. Having said this, it’s very hard to believe the anti-cop
legislation being proposed in the “Live Free or Die” state—by Republicans!

HB 218 would rescind a law enforcement officer’s authority to use deadly force during an arrest. Franklin, N.H. Police Chief David Goldstein said, “It will make it much more difficult, if not impossible, for us to effect our jobs in certain situations.” He’s so obviously right.

You might think the bill requires cops to throw away their firearms.
Not quite.
Reading the bill's
text,
it still allows officers to us deadly force to defend themselves or
a third party, or to stop someone from using a deadly weapon while
fleeing/resisting apprehension. The change is that deadly force is
no longer allowed merely to effect an arrest.

Or at least that's what it looks like to me.

And we have (unlikely source) Zac Kurylyk, writing in Canada Moto
Guide, on his early-spring motorcycle tour of our fine state:
The Ride of the April Fool.

Everywhere I looked, licence plates and flags told me New
Hampshire was the place to Live Free, Or Die. As a person of
generally libertarian leanings myself, I couldn’t help but
sympathize with the sentiment, but I wished the locals had been
willing to shoulder a heavier tax burden in order to keep the roads
up. State Route 25 turned decidedly unpleasant, as the DOT had
decided signs warning of frost heaves were better than actually
fixing the problem.

I hear you, Zac. In our slight defense, April is a good month for frost heave tourism.

URLs du Jour

Roger Stone, the self-described "dirty trickster" with a tattoo of Richard Nixon's head on his back, should appreciate the irony that he has been tripped up by the Watergate-era adage that "it's not the crime; it's the cover-up." Except in this case it looks like there was no crime to cover up, which makes the messy web of deceit described in the federal indictment against Stone seem like a trap he set for himself.

The indictment, obtained by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, charges Stone, a longtime adviser to Donald Trump who worked for the billionaire developer's campaign until August 2015, with one count of obstructing a proceeding (an investigation by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence), five counts of making false statements during a 2017 HPSCI hearing, and one count of tampering with a witness by trying to dissuade a now-former friend from contradicting his congressional testimony. Those are all felonies, punishable by up to five years in prison for each of the first six counts and up to 20 for the seventh.

World-renowned rodent fornicator Roger Stone was arrested this morning, providing a wonderful moment to be literal, figurative, and literary all at once: for it would take a heart of Stone not to laugh. This lexicological ménage à trois should not be confused with the sort of threesome Roger solicited in Local Swing Fever.

The link goes to a (um) interesting-but-sleazy 2008 New Yorker article.
Containing, for example. this detail:

Stone worked for Donald Trump as an occasional lobbyist and as an adviser when Trump considered running for President in 2000. “Roger is a stone-cold loser,” Trump told me. “He always tries taking credit for things he never did.”

If you're uninterested in Stone, Jonah also looks at the Great Covington
Kerfuffle and Identity Politics.

Warren is too busy inveighing against “corruption” to define it precisely, but she probably means what economists call rent-seeking, which in the context of politics means bending government power for private advantage, either by conferring advantages on oneself or imposing disadvantages on competitors. Although Warren’s inveighing is virtuous, her program would substantially exacerbate the problem by deepening government’s involvement in the allocation of wealth and opportunity.

She was a registered Republican from 1991
to 1996 because “I thought that those
were the people who best supported markets.” Today, she favors “big structural change.” Her Accountable Capitalism Act would
produce the semi-nationalization of large corporations, with federal
charters requiring (among other things) 40 percent of their
directors to be elected by employees. Such accountable-to-government
(not to markets) corporations must have “a material positive impact
on society . . . when taken as a whole.” This gaseous metric will be
defined and applied by government. Such federalization of corporate
law would inevitably be the thin end of an enormous wedge of
government control, crowding out market signals. As would her Climate Risk Disclosure Act. And
her American Housing and Economic Mobility
Act. And her Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act
(government-run production of generic drugs).

Mr. Will sees Sen. Warren as Margaret Thatcher "inverted". I'm not
sure about that. But he identifies her inherent problem, saying
both (a) government is a hopelessly corrupt tool of the
well-off; so (b) let's give government a lot more power.

And a new carbon tax doesn’t magically become “revenue neutral” because new revenues are matched by new spending.

To be sure, supporters can argue that their plan is “deficit neutral,” and that would be legitimate (even though I would argue that this wouldn’t be the case in the long run because of the adverse economic impact of new taxes and new spending).

But “revenue neutral” is a bald-faced lie.

Good point. I have self-interested reasons to oppose a carbon tax:
after decades of coughing up income taxes to Uncle Sugar, I'm
supposed to be luxuriating in low-tax-bracket retirement. And now
suddenly, I'm going to be hit with (essentially) a whopping-big
sales tax on everything I buy? (Because just about everything
involves, at least, carbon-energy costs in transportation.)

When Sen. Dianne Feinstein told Amy Coney Barrett, who is now confirmed as a judge for the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and is a potential Supreme Court nominee, that “dogma lives loudly within” her and “that’s of concern,” she wasn’t voicing concern over the nominee’s religious orthodoxy as much as she was revealing her own.

After all, Catholicism, unlike progressivism, has never inhibited anyone from faithfully executing her constitutional duties—which the judge has done with far more conviction than Feinstein. Maybe Barrett should have been asking the questions.

As David observes, in America today "Progressives are the most
zealous moralists." And they pursue sinners with a zeal unseen
since, … I don't know, the Spanish Inquisition?

The Phony Campaign

2019-01-27 Update

For the past few weeks, in order to find
"credible" candidates (i.e., not Caroline Kennedy), we looked at
the
combinined
Democrat and Republican "nomination probability" tables found at
Predictwise;
in order to qualify for phony analysis, they had to crack 3%
probability there.

This week, we're switching over to the
Next
President horserace table at British betting site Betfair. Computing
probabilities from the "decimal odds" shown at Betfair depends on
slightly arbitrary decisions. For our level of betting expertise
(i.e., none at all), we're going (more or less) with the method
described at
ElectionBettingOdds.com,
a fun site run by Maxim Lott and John Stossel: 100 times the average of
the reciprocals of the "Back all" and "Lay all" Betfair odds… and then
dinking things a bit if there's too big a spread between the Back and
Lay odds, evidence of a too-thin market for that candidate.

And finally: our arbitrary inclusion criterion is that this calculated probability
has to be 2% or higher.

So what does this give us? Compared to last week, we drop Mitt Romney, John Kasich, and Cory
Booker; we add in Tulsi Gabbard and Michael Bloomberg. And then proceed
as usual, looking for Google hits for their name combined with "phony".

And this week, Senator Kamala continues to hold onto her impressive lead
over President Bonespurs. Could her phony lead be for real… er, whatever
that means? We'll see.

(Since this is a new probability calculation, we don't show the change
from last week. That column should return next week.)

At his blog, Daniel Greenfield attempts to answer a question you
might think everyone's answered to their own satisfaction by now:
Why No One Likes Elizabeth Warren.

Elizabeth Warren is Hillary Clinton reborn, and they’re both
unlikable, because they’re both inauthentic scolds who suffer from hall monitor syndrome. They spent their entire lives breaking every rule they could find while awkwardly fantasizing about running every tiny detail of everyone else’s lives.

Warren and Clinton are both unlikable because you can’t picture either one having any fun. When they boast about carrying hot sauce in their purses or drink beers on livestream, you roll your eyes.

An inability to have fun is a forgivable sin. Joyless people power professions from TSA night shifts to laundromat sock inspectors. But combine that with an obsessive need to monitor, regulate and eradicate other people’s fun, and you have the miserable essence of the progressive movement.

A scold.

Scolds come in both sexes. America’s greatest scold is the eight-richest man in America who spends half his time trying to force people to drink smaller sodas. That’s why nobody liked Michael Bloomberg when he was trying to ban salt and jaywalking in New York City. It’s why not even Elizabeth Warren voters will vote for him even if he drops his threatened $100 million to come in 32nd in the 2020 Dem primaries.

Scolds are awkward and arrogant. They’ve spent a lifetime navigating the
system, but never learned to fake plausible human emotions. They stay up nights afraid that somebody, somewhere is having fun. The only game they know is bureaucracy, and they play it to get the nicest office chairs and ruin the most people’s lives. In Colonial America, scolds burned witches. In modern times, they wipe out lives.

That's a long excerpt, but the whole thing is perceptive and (as
usual) I encourage you to RTWT.

I assume that Michael Bloomberg has been given relatively decent
odds of winning because he could run as an independent, and finance
his campaign by thoroughly checking his sofa for loose change. And
there's a good chance both major parties could repeat 2016 and
nominate candidates that are easy to despise.

I'm not a fan, roughly for the same reason that Reason had
him in first place in its 2013 article
45
Enemies of Freedom. He hasn't changed his spots.

But for a more current take, we have Kevin D. Williamson at
National Review, who finds it more likely, and desirable,
that EoF#1 Bloomberg run as a D:
Michael Bloomberg 2020: Why Not?.

It is difficult not to think of Bloomberg as the responsible adult in the likely 2020 field. Sure, he’s a neurotic nanny who obsesses about salt and soda; Kamala Harris is a two-bit totalitarian who abused her legal powers as attorney general of California in a naked bid to intimidate her political enemies — until the Supreme Court made her knock it off. Elizabeth Warren is a scheming opportunist who spent years doing a pretty good Lou Dobbs impersonation until she scented an opening in the Occupy Wall Street lane. Bernie Sanders has gone from bonkers and fresh to bonkers and stale. Julián Castro didn’t even have the guts to challenge Ted Cruz, who almost lost his Senate race to Tracy Flick in drag. Tulsi Gabbard is going to spend the entire race trying to explain away the fact that she used to be to the right of Dick Cheney on gay rights, and Kirsten Gillibrand will spend it explaining away the fact that she used to be to the right of Marco Rubio on immigration and a few other issues. Richard Ojeda, a.k.a. “Who?”, is running for vice president at most. Cory Booker is a fundamentally unserious man.

What do I know? It could happen, although if Democrats were in the
mood to nominate the "responsible adult", they would… I dunno,
exhume Adlai Stevenson?

Nine: In her 2006 campaign for Senate, she ripped her opponent, Representative Mark Kennedy, for voting for earmarks, listing “the bridges to nowhere, the rain forest in Iowa, the waterless urinals in Michigan” and pledging to cut them. In an analysis of congressional earmarks, OpenSecrets.org found that Klobuchar sponsored or co-sponsored 103 earmarks totaling $200 million in fiscal year 2008, 88 earmarks totaling $133 million in fiscal year 2009, and 88 earmarks totaling $117 million in fiscal year 2010. This put her in the top third in the U.S. Senate in the first year and in middle of the pack the following years.

The earmarks included $89 million for light-rail projects over the three-year period, $1.6 million in defense appropriations bill for a “Tire to Track Transformer System for Light Vehicles” from Mattracks Inc. of Karlstad, Minn., and several multimillion-dollar earmarks for plasma sterilizer from Minneapolis-based Phygen Inc.

URLs du Jour

In what is basically a 30 Rock episode come to life, the federal Department of Energy designed and purchased a mascot costume to warn children about the dangers of environmental catastrophe—and to haunt their dreams, apparently.

Thanks to a FOIA request from journalist Emma Best, the details of which were published this week at Muckrock, we now know a bit more about the history of the Green Reaper—a verdant version of the Grim Reaper that manages to combine the ominous presence of the original with the vacant eyes of a cartoon character. While the mascot seems best suited to shatter children's innocence by informing them about the inevitabilty of their own deaths, the documents show that the Green Reaper, which was designed in 2012, was intended to be used in "community outreach presentations to local elementary school children" and in internal memos reminding government workers to conserve energy and carpool when possible.

The costume cost $5K, but that doesn't count the employee time spent
in (no doubt countless)
meetings and presentations. Or even having employees with enough
free time on their hands to dream this up.

Bottom line: AOC jumped on a false claim about a paper cited in a fact-check critical of her. Then she doubled-down suggesting the author might be a revolving-door lobbyist. Then she finally apologized for the insinuation when pressed by someone at the Post. But she’s still claiming victory over Kessler as if none of that mattered. Once again with AOC, it seems being “morally right” is more important to her than being factually accurate. That certainly seems to play well with her admirers, including the many in the media.

By standards previously established (Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin) she
deserves merciless MSM ridicule. She will not get it; you'll have to
visit the right-wing fever swamps to see it.

(Geeknote: I usually take my link text
from a page's HTML <title> element, often the same as the headline.
But the current headline is punchier: "The Kulaks Must Be Liquidated
as a Class")

Revolutions do not set out to be awful. Not usually. They just end up that way. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, many of them wanted to prohibit capital punishment, which they saw as a high-handed czarist institution. V. I. Lenin overruled them. “How can you make a revolution without executions?” he asked. The key to revolution in his mind — and in those of his revolutionary antecedents and descendants — was terror. “We shall return to terror and to economic terror,” he promised, in a revolution of “unrestricted power based on force, not law.”

Senator Warren apparently has found her guiding spirit and has announced along with her presidential campaign a campaign of economic terror based on force, not law. Specifically, she has proposed to begin seizing a portion of the assets of some wealthy Americans, a course of action that the federal government has no constitutional power to undertake. The seizure of assets is a fundamentally different thing from the taxation of income, which itself took a constitutional amendment to implement. What Warren is proposing is essentially a federal version of the hated asset-forfeiture programs that have been so much abused by law-enforcement agencies — minus the allegation of criminal misconduct and made universal and annual.

Dreadful as Warren's proposal is on the grounds of political
morality, I'll make a practical objection too:

Rich people don't have a money bin, like Scrooge McDuck. Well, maybe
Bezos, does. But generally they don't.

Instead their wealth is made up of various assets, varying in
risk, liquidity, and physical nature.

So when you say Joe is "worth" $X million dollars, you're really
saying that Joe could get $X million if he sold off his assets.

So if he gets a tax bill for $(0.05X) million from Uncle Sugar, Joe
will have to sell off some of those assets.

But (here's the kicker): his assets are only worth $X million
because they are perceived as a durable store of value. When
subjected to the Warren expropriation, they no longer have that
perception. They'll be worth a lot less.

Put another way: assuming you're not an idiot, would you give
Joe full asking price for his assets knowing
that he must sell?

In local news, Drew Cline of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public
Policy notes the latest crony capitalism effort by a
Republican legislator, in league with guess who?
Oscar asks for a handout.

In the last legislative session, this newsletter warned about the dangerous precedent legislators would set if they passed a tax incentive package tailored for a specific industry, in this case a single company, Manchester’s Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI). New Hampshire doesn’t do industrial tax incentives, we warned, and if the state starts, other industries will come, hat in hand, to explain how their critically important industry deserves special tax treatment too.

Behold, on Wednesday, before the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Tim Lang, R-Sanbornton, presented his bill (House Bill 234) to create a film industry tax credit. To sell it, he noted that it was based on the ARMI bill.

“The wording is almost identical to the regenerative tissue bill,” he said.

Yes, also appearing before the committee was Ernest Thompson, who
brought along his Oscar for On Golden Pond. Glitz.

But (fortunately) he was followed by Josiah Bartlett testimony
showing (of course convincingly) that tax subsidies to the film
industry are "costly and ineffective giveaways". Hope that the
legislators listened more to that than the showbiz.

Thanks to the new guidelines from the American Psychological Association (APA) for practice with men and boys, male psychology is no longer a mystery and mental health professionals are now equipped with the tools they need to combat the worst forms of it. According to the APA, boys and men are at risk of suffering from traditional masculinity which is on the whole unhealthy. Turns out, the traditional masculinity that drives many of us men to be confident, assertive, adventurous, stoic, and willing to take risks for our goals, the people we love, and sometimes even complete strangers are bad for us and society.

Who knew?

Biologists, philosophers, theologians, physicians, parents, and really almost all regular folk have long believed that there are meaningful and biologically-based psychological differences between males and females. Fortunately for us mere mortals, the APA is setting the record straight. It is an oppressive patriarchy, not biology, that has shaped our psychology. Gender and the masculine traits associated with being male are social constructs. The APA obviously isn’t denying that evolution is true. They aren’t some kind of silly group of religious fundamentalists. But like most educated progressives, they understand that evolution stopped at the neck.

What's the downside of combating "traditional masculinity"? I, for
one, anticipate an infestation of spiders.

After the news broke earlier today that President Trump has agreed to end the government shutdown, the nation's libertarians gathered somberly outside the Capitol Building today to scream at the sky the moment the government reopens.

"As soon as the bill to fully restore our bloated federal government is passed into law, we will scream at the sky uncontrollably," said Henry Renaldo, a libertarian activist from New Hampshire as he held back tears. "I had hoped this was Trump's 4D chess masterstroke to keep the government shut down forever, but it seems he's a deep state operative just like the rest of them."

Yeah, darn. As the Bee says: "At publishing time, sources had
confirmed the method was just as effective as libertarians' usual
political strategies."

“I think it’s wrong that a vast majority of the country doesn’t make a living wage, I think it’s wrong that you can work 100 hours and not feed your kids. I think it’s wrong that corporations like Walmart and Amazon can get paid by the government, essentially experience a wealth transfer from the public, for paying people less than a minimum wage.”

I drop off at the first clause.
Most English-speakers would conclude that a country where a "vast
majority" aren't getting a "living wage" would very soon have a lot
of dead people on its hands.

But "living wage" is a term of art in Progressiveville, so Kessler
runs with that. And (guess what) it's still untrue.

The living wage is not really a measure of income but of living costs, before taxes, such as food, child care, housing, transportation and other basic necessities; it does not include meals in restaurants, entertainment or vacations. It is often misreported as an income figure, but it cannot be easily compared to income such as a minimum wage — even though it is.

There are several versions of the Living Wage calculator, which all focus on the costs in a particular locality. There are wide variations, and so a nationwide average does not really capture that.

The MIT Living Wage calculator, run by Amy Glasmeier, a professor of economic geography and regional planning, says the living wage in the United States was $16.07 per hour in 2017, before taxes, for a family of four (two working adults, two children). That means both adults together would need to make at least $32.14 before taxes to cover basic necessities.

So Kessler really tried to take AOC's claim seriously, but still
couldn't get it anywhere close to resembling reality.

One problem: the quoted study (from 2005) was by Jason Furman, hardly a
Republican toady: he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under
Obama. And even though the link Kessler provided to Furman's paper
was at the Mackinac Center (which bills itself as "a nonprofit institute that
advances the principles of free markets and limited government", red
flags to Correct Thinkers), Furman's paper wasn't funded by either
Walmart or Mackinac.

This is a moldy argument also used by writer Annie Lowrey in a much-cited article in The Atlantic last year titled “Jeff Bezos’ $150 billion fortune is a policy failure.” Lowrey argued that Amazon is able to succeed because the government “ameliorates the effects of poverty wages with policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.” But this reasoning ignores the economic and business reality that if you are going to have a private sector, then private firms simply aren’t going to hire workers at a wage more than they are worth to the firm. It also ignores the fact that the Earned Income Tax Credit is a government benefit that promotes work and boosts living standards. And if Medicaid benefits corporations at the taxpayer’s expense, then it’s strange that leftists like Ocasio-Cortez don’t view Medicare-for-all — which would let employers completely off the hook for health coverage — as a massive subsidy to business.

Note that "if you are going to have a private sector"? That's really
the issue for AOC and her fellow progressives. Although I suspect
they know (deep down) that the private sector is what drives growth and prosperity.
They simply view it as a useful punching bag, something they can
demonize for their bubbas, in order to enhance their own power and
prestige.

Let me be direct about this: You people are a bunch of hysterical ninnies, and it is time for you to grow the hell up.

You know who you are.

The Covington fiasco has proved to be a clarifying moment. And here is what has been made clear: Much of the American media is no longer engaged in journalism. It is engaged in opposition research and in what is sometimes known among political operatives as “black p.r.”—the sinister twin of ordinary public relations. As Joy Behar, as profoundly dim and tedious a person as American public life has to offer, forthrightly confessed: The hysteria and outright dishonesty surrounding the Covington students had nothing to do with them. It has to do with narrowly partisan, selfish, deeply stupid, entirely unpatriotic, childish, foot-stamping, fingers-in-the-ears, weeping, cooties-loathing, teary-eyed, tremulous, quavering, pansified, gormless, deceitful, dishonorable, and cynical politics of the lowest kind — the politics of Us and Them.

It's a gem, even by KDW standards, which are high.

At the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan says
The
Media Must Learn From the Covington Catholic Story. (But I bet
they will not.) She traces the trajectory of the story, does the
painstaking work of watching videos, and if you're unclear on any of
it, it's worthwhile reading. Her bottom line:

How could the elite media—The New York Times, let’s say—have protected themselves from this event, which has served to reinforce millions of Americans’ belief that traditional journalistic outlets are purveyors of “fake news”? They might have hewed to a concept that once went by the quaint term “journalistic ethics.” Among other things, journalistic ethics held that if you didn’t have the reporting to support a story, and if that story had the potential to hurt its subjects, and if those subjects were private citizens, and if they were moreover minors, you didn’t run the story. You kept reporting it; you let yourself get scooped; and you accepted that speed is not the highest value. Otherwise, you were the trash press.

At 8:30 yesterday morning, as I was typing this essay, TheNew York Times emailed me. The subject line was “Ethics Reminders for Freelance Journalists.” (I have occasionally published essays and reviews in the Times). It informed me, inter alia, that the Times expected all of its journalists, both freelance and staff, “to protect the integrity and credibility of Times journalism.” This meant, in part, safeguarding the Times’ “reputation for fairness and impartiality.”

I am prompted to issue my own ethics reminders for The New York Times. Here they are: You were partly responsible for the election of Trump because you are the most influential newspaper in the country, and you are not fair or impartial. Millions of Americans believe you hate them and that you will casually harm them. Two years ago, they fought back against you, and they won. If Trump wins again, you will once again have played a small but important role in that victory.

One thing is for sure: People are angry. "Voters around the world are revolting against leaders who won't improve their lives," as Carlson put it in his now-famous January 2 monologue. It's hard not to be filled with righteous fury at America's elites—after all, we're getting screwed. Aren't we?

In fact, the data suggest nothing of the sort. Decades of what Ben Shapiro called "supply and demand economics" have brought about miraculous gains in human well-being. These are most dramatic at a global level: In just 10 years, extreme poverty around the world has dropped from 18.1 to 8.6 percent. But contrary to the picture painted by Carlson and others, the United States has fared swimmingly as well.

I'm kind of a J.D. Vance fan, so it's a shame he's bought into this
particular narrative. I have hopes that he'll undergo a course
correction once he gets a fuller picture from people like Stephanie..

I've been "discussing" the Covington brouhaha with one of my lefty
Facebook friends, and one thing I've noticed is how much it
resembles the "Two Minutes
Hate" George Orwell invented for 1984, with the Covington kids
taking the place of Emmanuel Goldstein this week.

And (as I said there) we didn't even need Big Brother to coerce us; we gratefully
grabbed the tools gifted us by Zuck and Dorsey, and did it
willingly.

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (incredulity when a victory was announced, for instance) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

Mulling over what Orwell got right and wrong will be the work of decades to come. The video screens he envisioned are indeed ubiquitous, but they’re in our pockets, not run by a central authority. Orwell got one purpose of incessant video monitoring right, though: to identify and punish those whose facial expressions don’t conform to the cultural orthodoxy.

RTWT, as usual. I'll have more on this over the next few days,
probably. Sorry. This snowflake has been triggered.

At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf offers a cheerful
prophecy:
Covington
Pile-On Will Destroy the Left. (Except, note, that it's the
Atlantic, so most of their readers won't consider it that
cheerful.) Focusing on particularly unhinged reactions, Conor says:

Were I to distill “the dynamics of the current moment into a single
image,” focusing on negatives, I’d seek out photos of children
forcibly separated from their parents at the Mexican border; or
addicts dead from opiate overdoses; or mass-shooting victims at a
synagogue; or white supremacists beating counterprotesters in
Charlottesville, Virginia; or lobbyists facilitating rent-seeking;
or homeowners blocking the construction of apartments in their
neighborhood; or segregated schools; or signs of climate change.

If you think the better choice is a photo of a smirking white 17-year-old, I suspect that the Donald Trump reelection team would thrill at letting you define the 2020 election. And I say that as someone who hates both the maga caps and the vicious campaign that popularized them.

As I'm sure I've said recently: Trump is extremely lucky in his
enemies.

So, earned or not, Ocasio-Cortez needs to be taken seriously, because she has the full backing of the liberal establishment — which is to say she will only rarely be challenged to explain her positions. Stephen Colbert didn’t grill Ocasio-Cortez on how her Marxist ideas comport with the Constitution, he asks her how many f-cks she gives about criticism. (Answer: “zero.”)

There are more pertinent questions. For instance, has anyone ever asked Ocasio-Cortez if, generally speaking, she believes a billionaire-free Cuban system that ostensibly offers free health care, guaranteed housing, a free education, and greater income equality is preferable to the United States’s vulgar, capitalistic model? If not, why not?

After all, what guiding ideological principle stops Ocasio-Cortez from supporting confiscatory policies? Why not nationalize the fossil fuel industry? This is our last chance to save humanity, after all. If she really believes the fight against climate change is analogous to the war against fascism — a war that cost the lives of somewhere around 80 million people worldwide — then why wouldn’t she propose taxing the wealthy at 50 or 60 percent across the board? If income inequality and concentrated wealth are a problem almost as dangerous as climate change, would she be negligent if she failed to support those policies?

If you read/watch the news, you've been subjected to any number of
continuing sob stories about Federal employees. At Cato,
Chris Edwards will dry any tears you might have, looking at a recent
NYT story on
Pay for Federal Government Workers.

The NYT uses data from the Bureau of Economic (BEA) for its pay comparisons. Federal worker wages averaged $90,794 in 2017, which was 48 percent higher than the private sector average of $61,311. But as the NYT article indicates, gold-plated benefits are a key advantage that federal workers enjoy over private-sector workers.

The chart below shows BEA data on total compensation, wages plus benefits. Compensation averaged $130,429 for federal workers in 2017, which was 79 percent higher than the private-sector average of $72,992.

As I'm pretty sure I've said before: Progressives love to deride
"trickle-down economics", but remain blind to Uncle Sugar grabbing
our tax money, and doling out a
generous
slice to itself
before
sending some back to the hinterlands.

The most persuasive data, when comparing the United States and Scandinavia, are the numbers showing that Americans of Swedish, Danish, Finnish, and Norwegian descent produce much more prosperity than those who remained in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway.

Though his family has German roots, Andrei grew up in Romania in the late 1950s and 60s, a time at which getting “out to the country” was a part of the culture in many ways. “I lived in Bucharest, which is the capital, but the country was always present. In Europe, cities and the country are more linked because of the way cities are supplied. The supermarkets were bare all the time, so going out to the country was something people had to do.”

Folks would travel to the country to supplement government rations. But it wasn’t just food that drove them there. Living in Romania at the time, meant that Andrei and his family were behind the iron curtain. So, going for a hike was as much about protecting their sanity.

“It was a very oppressive system. Not that kids notice so much, but the parents did. It was a surveillance society. In those days, it was people listening to your phone, and your neighbors turning you in. And this,” he indicates the forest trail we found opurselves hiking in Newbury that day “meant freedom from that…being out in the woods. Nobody listens here.” On a ridge, out of sight of houses, out of earshot from everyone, you can stand and listen to a different kind of chatter.

Eventually Andrei left Romania, and landed in New York City just
before Thanksgiving, 1974, but his restless bones drove him ever
north. “And for somebody who lived behind the Iron Curtain, Live
Free or Die looked really good. So I said, “ok I can stop here.” And I’ve loved NH ever since. I’ve been here 30 years now.”

URLs du Jour

Gordon Gekko missed the mark with his famous Wall Street
monologue about American capitalism. It is not greed but economic
growth that is, for lack of a better word, good. Growth is right.
Growth works. Growth clarifies, cuts through, and captures the
essence of the evolutionary spirit. Growth has marked the upward
surge of mankind. And growth—you mark my words—will save that
malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

This is probably pretty obvious to most Americans. Strong economic growth means more jobs and higher wages. Just take a look at the current expansion. It has only been moderate as goes the pace of growth, but it has been sustained. And month after month of a growing economy has brought down the unemployment rate to its lowest level since 1969, even as real wages continue to grow for all income levels. That’s especially true for working-class Americans. The 3.5-percent unemployment rate for Americans with only a high school diploma is the lowest since 2000. Indeed, despite all the debate about income inequality, earnings have been growing faster for those at the bottom than at the top.

Mr. Pethokoukis writes in response to those on the right, like Oren
Cass, who have departed from the free market faith. Repent, Oren!

In the Kavanaugh case, conservative men and women looked at decades-old, uncorroborated allegations, the unquestioning acceptance of those claims, and the furious effort to destroy a man’s reputation and career – even by passing along the wildest and most implausible claims – and thought, “That could be me” or “that could be my husband.”

Now, these same people look at the reaction to the Covington Catholic kids and think, “That could be my son.”

Indeed. But actually, I did some pretty stupid things in high
school. If Trump offers to nominate me to the Supreme Court, I'd
probably decline, because who wants that stuff on the news?

I recommend this
op-ed
by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.
. Not because I agree with its recommendation of super high tax rates on the rich, but because it makes clear the perspectives and motives of the Left.

In the standard economic approach to optimal redistribution (such as Okun and Mirrlees), the case for progressive taxation is based on diminishing marginal utility. But that is not the essence of the matter, according to Saez and Zucman. They view rich people as fundamentally undermining democracy. It is more a political argument than an economic one.

Prof Mankiw's link will take you to the op-ed. It is remarkable for
its lack of sophistication. Pretty much: hey we used to have
high taxes on the rich, it was an "American tradition" for a few
decades, undone by that rascally Ronnie Reagan.

But now we've had (relatively) low marginal rates on the
"rich" for almost the same amount of time. Disaster? No, they just
don't like the esthetics.

Popular fact-checking site Snopes.com confirmed Wednesday they are debuting a new "Factually inaccurate but morally right" fact check result for claims they don't want to debunk because they coincide with Snopes editors' worldview.

The fact-checking website will now label inaccurate claims that they deem "morally right" with the new label, giving public figures whose hearts are in the right place a pass.

"We were often running into situations were a truth claim was absolutely absurd, but it supported progressive causes," said one Snopes editor. "So sometimes we just called it a 'Mixture,' but then people might get the idea that our favorite politicians are being slightly dishonest sometimes."

It's nice that Snopes is finally coming clean on this. (Even though
they aren't.)

URLs du Jour

2019-01-22

Anyone know an emoji that represents: "OK, my first instinct was disgust
and outrage, but then I kind of thought it was funny, and then I
realized it was yet another symptom of the frivolous
irresponsibility and vicious tribalism of our times"?

The closest thing I can find is the "eyeroll" emoji, which you can get
on a t-shirt as our Amazon Product du Jour. Suggestions for anything
closer are welcome.

William McGurn writes in the WSJ today on
The Shaming of Karen Pence.
Her sin is to teach art part-time at Immanuel Christian School,
whose employment contract specifies employees must agree with the
traditional definition of "marriage": one guy, one gal, makin'
appropriate amounts of baby-generating whoopee.

Today’s militant secularists ironically resemble the worst
caricatures of religious intolerance of early America. Where the
Puritans humiliated sinners with the stocks, the modern intolerant
have Twitter.
Where the Amish shunned those who lived contrary to their beliefs, today’s violators find themselves driven off the public square. And whereas in Hawthorne’s novel Hester Prynne was forced to wear a scarlet “A”—for adulterer—today we have folks such as Jimmy Kimmel using their popular platforms to paint the scarlet “H”—for hater—on people such as Mrs. Pence.

Why it's almost as if the disease of intolerance is playing
Whac-A-Mole with us. Defeated and defanged one place, it pops up
elsewhere. Unexpectedly!

(Except, as McGurn notes, Justice Sam Aliito did expect it in
his Obergefell dissent.)

But maybe you think that going on a diet and exercising will make you more self-confident and attractive, thus improving your marriage or romantic prospects. Then you’ll be happy, right?

The data don’t support this. According to the
2014 General Social Survey , the
average body mass index for people who classify themselves as “very
happy” is 27.4, which is about halfway between overweight and obese.
The average BMI for those who are “pretty happy” is 28.1 and “not
too happy” is 29. The measurement is clearly not a meaningful
indicator of happiness. The average BMI for people who say they have
“very happy” marriages is 28, which once again is indistinguishable
from that for those with pretty-happy and not-so-happy marriages.
Simply put, if your life lacks love, skipping those cherished potato
chips won’t solve your biggest problem.

Spoiler: Mr. Brooks' suggestions are (1) look at the true
sources of
happiness ("faith, family, friends and meaningful work that serves
others") instead of the barriers you perceive to happiness; (2) Make process
resolutions instead of outcome resolutions. Good advice,
probably.

The case against a single-payer health-care system is not only, or principally, its cost. It is that government-enforced monopolies are undesirable for other reasons, from their propensity to abuse their monopoly positions to the fact that they cultivate an attitude of dependency — which also can be exploited for political purposes. Just as workers have more power in an economy with a large number of employers competing for their labor, would-be college students and health-care consumers are better off when they have a great range of choices offered in an environment of strong competition. (The best indictment of the U.S. health-care system, pre- and post-ACA, is that it does not actually produce or encourage such a consumer-empowering environment.) Monopolies in the public and semi-public sector are no more desirable than monopolies in the private sector.

The "cost" arguments are good enough, but it would be nice if we
lived in a time where Kevin's argument was dispositive all by its
lonesome.

Hosted, rather ironically, by the school’s Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies, the photos, according to the front board, “reveal the humanity of the groups’ members rather than their invented personae.” Black Panther members “are real people, with real stories, who are your next door neighbors. They don’t fit the profile of rabid, anti-white, cop-hating terrorists…”

Ericka Huggins is one of the smiling old ladies in the exhibit. She helped torture young Alex Rackley with other Black Panther members, boiling the water they used to pour over his chest and commanding him to be quiet when he pleaded for mercy. Now she’s a lecturing professor. Rackley is dead. After falsely admitting he was an informant in hopes of stopping the hours of torture, Black Panthers killed him and dumped his body in a river.

Actually (according to the link above) Rackley lived for a number of
hours after being dumped in the river.

The latest issue of Nature magazine has a fascinating article that goes some of the way in vindicating Ronald Reagan’s infamous “gaffe” about how trees cause air pollution (because they do), but offers much much more about the problems of politicized and supposedly “settled” climate science. The article is called “How Much Can Forests Fight Climate Change?“, and it walks through just how unsettled this question is. The subhed to the story offers a good summary: “Trees are supposed to slow global warming, but growing evidence suggests they might not always be climate saviours.”

And, yes, the Nature article does contain a quote from an
actual scientist, Christopher Williams at Clark University in
Worcester, MA: “I have heard scientists say that if we found forest loss cooled the planet, we wouldn’t publish it.”

These are among the many problems that people have perceived as plaguing economically advanced societies during the past century or so. They differ greatly and involve different causes, mechanisms, and consequences.

Yet in every case the solution has been widely seen as the same: vastly enlarging the power of government. It’s almost enough to make a skeptic wonder whether each perceived or proclaimed problem has been intended from the start to serve as a pretext for a government power grab—especially when one appreciates that somehow the problems that enhanced government power is supposed to solve never get solved to the satisfaction of those who sought the power, but only cry out in their view for even greater augmentation of government power.

Mr. Higgs missed a few, of course. Opioid overdoses! Suicide! Divorce!
All easily fixable by just tossing more control and money to the state.

URLs du Jour

In my eons on the internet, one lesson I have tried to take to heart — not always successfully — is that in the long run, it’s best to stand on the sidelines of the great race to be wrong first.

To that end, I’ll just say that I don’t know if the BuzzFeed story alleging that Donald Trump ordered Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, and other nefarious doings, is true. One of the main reporters may or may not be trustworthy. All of the sources are anonymous. The story claims that there are documents supporting the charge, but the reporters may not have seen them, so if the sources are lying about the major facts, why wouldn’t they lie about the corroborating facts as well? As Brit Hume often likes to note, exclusive bombshells don’t stay exclusive for very long. If we go much longer without another news outlet corroborating the story, it’s likely because it can’t be corroborated for a reason.

But are the charges believable?

Trump defenders are right that we’ve been here before. Blockbuster allegations are reported. A few days later, the story either falls apart or deflates significantly. But here’s the interesting thing. Between the time of the initial report and the correction, one rarely hears the professional defenders say, “This story is unbelievable and false.” It’s only when the correction comes that they are suddenly overcome with indignation that anyone would suggest such a thing. Only after they have a factual backstop do they shriek, “you had to be suffering from Trump derangement syndrome to have believed the report in the first place!” These rhetorical lacunae are revealing, because I think it shows that the praetorians believe the charges are possibly true. (Also revealing: The tendency to stop shouting “Fake News” whenever MSM reporting is beneficial to the White House.)

Well, that's not actually about "national solidarity". That comes
later in the text, and it's good too.

Trump is fortunate in having completely unhinged and irresponsible
adversaries in the "respectable" press.

My lefty Facebook friends went apeshit over the confrontation
between a saintly Native American and a wise-ass Catholic kid at the
National Right to Life March in DC. I remember thinking: this looks
bad, and it might be, but something about the narrative smells a little too
perfect.

Partial video footage of students from a Catholic high school allegedly harassing a Native American veteran after the anti-abortion March for Life rally in Washington, D.C., over the weekend quickly went viral, provokingwidespreadcondemnation of the kids on social media. Various media figures and Twitter users called for them to be doxed, shamed, or otherwise punished, and school administrators said they would consider expulsion.

But the rest of the video—nearly two hours of additional footage showing what happened before and after the encounter—adds important context that strongly contradicts the media's narrative.

Under scrutiny from lawmakers of both parties and academic groups, universities have been closing their Chinese government-run centers at a brisk pace.

The University of Kansas has not publicly moved to shutter its Confucius Institute, however, and a KU student wanted to know if administrators had discussed the possibility. He filed a public records request a month ago.

The taxpayer-funded university gave him an answer Thursday: $506.50.

Back when I worked at the University Near Here, we used to get
"public records requests" (also subpoenas) that demanded we search
through mailboxes for matching messages. This required expenditures
of employee time
that could have been spent doing something else, of course.
(YouTube, Twitter, Facebook,…)

But $506.25 isn't outrageous, especially if it involves
redacting non-relevant bits of matching messages. I doubt that it
implies that the University of Kansas has something it wants to
hide.

(Although they might have something they want to hide.)

Anyway, GoFundMe was invoked, the $506.25 was raised, and we'll see
what happens next.

Nowhere in America is belief in the merits of free markets
stronger than in New Hampshire. Last year, for the third time in a
row, two groups, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Canada’s
Fraser Institute, declared that “New Hampshire, the Live Free or
Die state, has the highest level of economic freedom among all U.S. states.” On its website, the Concord-based Josiah Bartlett Center proudly declares itself to be a “free-market think tank.” The platform of the state’s Libertarian Party declares that the only economic system “compatible with the protection of individual rights is the free market.”

Free markets are the supposed solution to lower costs for energy, health care and all manner of things, and they supposedly work better when taxes are low. But the market has failed to deliver. American life expectancy is growing shorter. Even two-income families feel they can’t get ahead. Government, in the midst of the longest shutdown in U.S. history, is broken.

To adapt something I'm pretty sure I heard Thomas Sowell say once:
Listen up, Concord Monitor: I don't have a "belief" in free
markets. I have facts about free markets.

The Concord Monitor, on the other hand, seems to have a
childlike faith in the state. Even though it's "broken". All we need
to do is IncreaseTaxesOnTheRich! This will unbreak government!
Families will feel like they can get ahead! Life expectancy will
increase! Magic!

In our anger with the political party in power we don’t always see the silver linings. Nothing happens without a reason and I see a positive trend emerging since the 2016 election.

Democrats outnumber the Republicans 2 to 1 and being shocked out
of complacency / apathy a number of great things started happening.
The Blue Wave happened and is continuing to spread. The urgency in
this grassroots movement has increased to a “live-free-or-die” level regarding the president behaving as a Russian agent and becoming more autocratic as the Mueller investigation intensifies.

Dr. Hall sees the "blue wave" as a harbinger of LFOD? I beg to
differ. As would the Concord Monitor.

As a nearly everyday walker at
[Tod's]
Point,
I’ve been witness to many instances of dog owners flaunting the
rules sometimes innocently, but often deliberately when it comes to
excrement. Being a live-free-or-die libertarian Yankee is no excuse for dog poop incivility. No excuse for walking your dog over to a shady spot and watching him defecate without picking it up and sneering at me when I give you the stink eye. Encouraging your dog to run into the bushes to relieve himself…out of sight, out of mind. No excuse for not paying attention to your pup laying a trail of droppings as he walks like the elephant in the parade. No excuse for kicking sand over your dog’s dung, not 25 feet away from the supply of poop bags the town puts out for you to use.

Hey, I'm (arguably) a live-free-or-die libertarian Yankee,
and I religiously bag up my dog's poop on our walks. And I don't
mean just on Sundays.

The Phony Campaign

Yes, that's a phony (pardon me, "Faux") rock, available for a mere
$51.69 at Amazon. No idea how much of that price is due to the
hoity-toity "Faux" descriptor.

In nomination-odds news this week, both Hillary and Julian Castro have dipped
below our 3%
Predictwise
criterion for inclusion, as bettors thought better.

In our phony standings, Kamala has taken the lead with a (almost
certainly illusory) 4.9 million increase in her Google hits over last
week. Beto has come crashing back down (losing 11.5 million hits) and so
has Nikki Haley (down 1.7 million).

Dislike of him should be tempered by this consideration: He is an almost inexpressibly sad specimen. It must be misery to awaken to another day of being Donald Trump. He seems to have as many friends as his pluperfect self-centeredness allows, and as he has earned in an entirely transactional life. His historical ignorance deprives him of the satisfaction of working in a house where much magnificent history has been made. His childlike ignorance — preserved by a lifetime of single-minded self-promotion — concerning governance and economics guarantees that whenever he must interact with experienced and accomplished people, he is as bewildered as a kindergartener at a seminar on string theory.

Which is why this fountain of self-refuting boasts (“I have a very good brain”) lies so much. He does so less to deceive anyone than to reassure himself. And as balm for his base, which remains oblivious to his likely contempt for them as sheep who can be effortlessly gulled by preposterous fictions. The tungsten strength of his supporters’ loyalty is as impressive as his indifference to expanding their numbers.

Just brutal. And accurate.

Via Power Line (Welcome
to the Class Struggle Primaries), Brit researcher David
Klemperer provides Progressive Yanks with the only rating that
matters. (For the rest of us, it's a measure of how screwed we'll
be, should any of them win.)

I have devised a “Class Struggle Index” to rank Democratic presidential candidates. It shows whose side they are really on, by taking their lifetime score from the trade union confederation, the AFL-CIO, and subtracting their score from the Chamber of Commerce. Results below: pic.twitter.com/wlQ5t6HDsi

I assume the "1793" suffix on David's Twitter handle refers to the French Revolution's
"Year
I", back when Louis XVI went to the guillotine. Good times!

Comments Paul Mirengoff:

It’s a safe bet that Kirsten Gillibrand had a lower “class struggle”
rating when she represented a less than out-and-out liberal
congressional district, rather than the entire state of New York.
She’s a phony.

I wonder how much her phoniness can be expected to degrade her class
warriorship?

Moderator: Can you tell New Yorkers, who plan to vote for you on November 6, that you will, if re-elected, serve out your six-year Senate term?

Gillibrand: I will.

Moderator: Just want to make this clear, you’re saying that you will not get out of the race and you will not run for president? You will serve your six years?

Gillibrand: I will serve my six-year term.

Well, congrats to Kirsten. Dishonesty on that level shows her to be
a worthy competitor for Donald Trump. An impressive display of
New
York values!

But Kirsten is a target-rich environment, phonywise. At NR,
Alexandra DeSanctis looks at
The
Opportunism of Kirsten Gillibrand. She details the
needle-threading history of her public pronouncements on Al
Franken's wandering hands.

It wasn’t until December 6, 20 days after the first claim had surfaced, that Gillibrand leapt out ahead of her fellow Democrats to call for Franken’s resignation. Her statement was followed, within minutes, by similar calls from other Democratic senators.

To join the Democratic donor class in blaming Gillibrand for Franken’s demise, then, is wholly unfair. But so too is it unfair to celebrate her as a #MeToo hero who put her popularity on the line for the greater good. She was merely holding up a finger in the wind and drifting wherever the ethos of the moment dictated.

This tendency has defined her career. Consider just one example: When she ran for the Senate in 2010, she held an A rating from the NRA. That rating was immediately downgraded to an F after she won the election and, following her party’s trend, completely reversed her stance on the Second Amendment.

She will probably distinguish herself in the Democratic field by
being the candidate most likely to say whatever she thinks … will
help her get the necessary votes.

12.Biden publicly stated that, at the moment of decision about the raid that would ultimately kill Osama bin Laden, he had believed the mission was not worth the risk and told Obama, “Mr. President, my suggestion is don’t go.” But in a 2018 interview, he said he had publicly overstated his doubts to ensure Obama got more credit for making the decision to launch the raid. Unnamed Biden aides also claimed that Hillary Clinton had falsely claimed she had completely supported the decision to launch the raid, calling her account of the raid decision the “a**-covering, opportunistic version.”

A debate for the ages: who's phonier, Joe or Hillary? They each have
their special qualities.

15. For nearly ninety years, California state law prohibited images of handguns from being used in signs for gun stores. In 2014, after Harris’s office cited several gun shops, they sued, arguing that the law violated the First Amendment. Harris’s office argued that the law was needed to prevent handgun-related crime and suicide. Last year a federal judge ruled “the government has provided no evidence directly linking [the law] to reduced handgun suicide or crime,” concluded that the law was a “highly paternalistic approach to limiting speech,” and declared it “unconstitutional on its face.”

That was when Kamala was California's Attorney General. I'm sure
you're wondering: didn't she have to take an oath to support and
defend the Constitution in order to land that gig?

Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D., Texas) opposes the White House's desired southern border wall, but he deferred to the "wisdom of the people" on a range of other immigration questions in a new interview.

O'Rourke, one of dozens of potential Democratic 2020 White House
contenders, wasn't sure what to do about visa overstays—"I don't
know"—and told the Washington Post that the
answers to other questions surrounding illegal immigration will come
through open debates […]

Noted above: Kirsten Gillibrand will take whatever position
necessary to get people to vote for her. Beto, on the other hand,
will avoid taking positions, lest those positions cause people
to not vote for him.

Most of the WaPo interview on Beto O’Rourke is a nonprescription sleep aid. O’Rourke thinks he maybe has something to say about immigration and the border but apart from opposing the wall he isn’t too sure what. He says things like “I don’t know” and “worth debating.” He equivocates on what to do about border security, about withdrawing troops from Syria, about the Green New Deal. He says “I don’t know what to do” in so many ways that you wonder why he bothered to give an interview. Apparently it went on for two hours. How many espressos reporter Jenna Johnson needed to ward off somnolence is unknown.

[…]

O’Rourke blathers on. It takes a moment for it to sink in that he isn’t sure the Constitution still works. “I’m hesitant to answer it because I really feel like it deserves its due, and I don’t want to give you a — actually, just selfishly, I don’t want a sound bite of it reported, but, yeah, I think that’s the question of the moment: Does this still work? Can an empire like ours with military presence in over 170 countries around the globe, with trading relationships…and security arrangements in every continent, can it still be managed by the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago?” (Emphasis mine.)

Beto, like Kamala, will have to swear (or affirm) to "preserve, protect and defend"
the Constitution if he wins, a tough call if he doesn't think it
"works" any more. I hope someone asks him about that.

URLs du Jour

Trade itself may be a happy activity, but trade means transport, and transport means trade routes, and trade routes are where people are brought together… not always in a happy way.

When we trace the globe’s ancient trade routes, it is unpleasant to see what contentious regions they traverse and what grievous political fault lines they follow. Even worse is to note that most of these antique grudges are still evident on modern maps.

Check it out as Peej guides you "past the IEDs of Sinai terrorists,
through the Gaza kill zone, past trigger-happy Israeli checkpoints,
across the chaos of Lebanon, into Syria where ISIS is no less
murderous just because it’s “almost defeated,” only to wind up in
Baghdad."

[…] When I see critics respond to a Christian by telling them that they’re a bigot because of their loving beliefs, they’re telling that Christian he’s a liar. They’re telling that Christian he’s insincere in the origin and purpose of his deepest convictions. Every Christian can and should be prepared for questions about his faith. In fact, it’s a biblical imperative that Christians “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”

The claim of bigotry, however, is wrong. When it is used to attempt to drive Christians out of the public square, to block them from public offices, or to shame them out of even their own ministries, it’s an instrument of injustice. It’s intolerance in the name of tolerance — and, yes, sometimes it’s even hate in the name of love.

It's tempting to speculate that people who carelessly attribute
bigotry to others are simply projecting: "You must hate me… because
I hate you."

I'm old enough to remember the good old
Moral
Majority. As our Amazon Product du Jour, its stridency hasn't
gone away, it's just popped up on the other side.

“I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right,” Ocasio-Cortez told Cooper after he asked about her careless and incorrect analysis of the defense budget. In one sentence, Ocasio-Cortez portrayed herself as a woman who is ready to subordinate facts to her moral convictions, confirming achingly anti-female stereotypes. She may as well have driven erratically down the highway or failed to catch a gently thrown ball. Of course, she later admitted that being factually correct is “absolutely important.” She just doesn’t seem to care much about facts and numbers when she’s tweeting.

Or, for that matter, when she’s speaking. In discussing with Cooper her proposal for a “Green New Deal,” which would use the full force of the government in an attempt to convert the United States to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030, she could not offer an actual answer for how such an enormous transformation would be possible. “It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now,” was all she could say.

Said it before, but: I'm old enough to remember how the MSM treated
the occasional verbal blunders of
Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin. There's a real difference with AOC.

On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as "a red and extremely elongated asteroid." It was the first interstellar object to be detected within our solar system; the scientists named it 'Oumuamua, the Hawaiian word for a scout or messenger. The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard's astronomy department, co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that examined 'Oumuamua's "peculiar acceleration" and suggested that the object "may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth's vicinity by an alien civilization." Loeb has long been interested in the search for extraterrestrial life, and he recently made further headlines by suggesting that we might communicate with the civilization that sent the probe.

There are links in the article to an interview with Loeb in the
New Yorker and Loeb's article about 'Oumuamua in
Scientific American.

I can't help but think if Heinlein were still alive we'd be firing
up a torch ship to go out and catch up to the sumbitch.

Over at Free Keene (check out their modified banner it’s Free Keene Great) where we first picked up the story, things sound a bit more like what typically goes on in Keene. The city was stupid. It expected the restaurant to roll over. It didn’t. A court case based on the first amendment seemed likely if they kept pushing. So, Keene decided not to push their luck.

"Depend upon it, sir, when a town knows it is to be the object of
nationwide derision, it concentrates its mind wonderfully."

On Jan. 2, House Bill 101 — which would allow school districts to regulate firearms in school zones — was introduced by seven Democrats in the New Hampshire House of Representatives.

Since 2011, the state of New Hampshire has had authority over the sale, ownership, use, possession and permitting of all firearms in the state. However, this new bill would redistribute some of that power to individual school districts and allow them to enforce gun-free zones.

The leaders of both the College Republicans (anti) and the College
Democrats (pro, of course) are quoted. The latter caused the LFOD
news alert:

“This bill comes at a pertinent time in the question of the tension
between common sense gun regulation and personal gun ownership,
especially in a state like New Hampshire where the culture is ‘Live
Free or Die,’” [College Democrats president Gigi] Gunderson said. “We continue to support policies that make our schools and New Hampshire residents safer.”

Gigi at least gets the four words of the state motto correct,
although I suspect she'd prefer it to be "Live Safe and Obey".

URLs du Jour

Expanding federal grants and loans to finance higher education has predictably given colleges the ability to raise prices, which in turn requires students to take on even more debt to pay the new higher prices. It’s not a new story. In 1965 Washington launched a program to make college “affordable” by offering a taxpayer guarantee on student loans. By an amazing coincidence college costs have been rising much faster than inflation ever since.

James quotes from coverage of the June 2008 Detroit campaign stop of
then-candidate Obama. A "tearful" young lady noted that she was
"about $1500 short" of paying for her dental hygeine studies at
Wayne County Community College.

In response, Obama promised “I will make college affordable for
every American. Period.”

It's unknown whether the student somehow managed to get her
schooling, but certainly that's a broken promise.

As a Pun Salad value-added, I was able to find a
spreadsheet
showing the historical tuition rates for Michigan community
colleges, including Wayne County. Since the 2008 event, it appears
that their per-credit hour tuition has gone up about 6.6% annually.
About double the CPI increase since then.

Bottom line: when politicians promise to make things "affordable",
run away.

Being a metallurgical engineer (as I, too, would later become), my father was especially irritated by ads for razors. In one well-known spot for the Vintage Stainless Steel Doubled-Edged Blade (this was before my time, but he often talked about it), an actor would be asked to compare a “Personna Stainless, seven shaves old” with another “well-known blade, brand new”—shaving half his face with each. The actor, of course, identifies the Personna as being the more comfortable of the pair. The announcer then hammers home the fact that the Personna prevailed despite being seven shaves old. But that fact was meaningless, my father would tell me (and others), because the main cause of shaving-blade degradation isn’t contact with skin. It’s the gradual oxidation that takes place when the blade dries off, over hours or days, after it’s been used—a phenomenon that wouldn’t apply to a blade that (as in this case) presumably had been used seven times in rapid succession.

It’s an example my dad would bring up repeatedly whenever a dumb commercial would come on TV, since the same general principle applies to most ad campaigns for mass-market products. Coca-Cola doesn’t make you smile. The “Rich Corinthian Leather” that Chrysler used to upholster car seats wasn’t actually from Corinth. And smoking Virginia Slims doesn’t actually mean “You’ve come a long way, baby.” It probably just means you’re going to die of lung cancer.

I'm tempted to oversimplify: there are two kinds of people in the
world, those who actually
like politically-correct virtue-signalling, others
who find it obnoxiously off-putting. These groups will never
understand each other.

At American Consequences, P.J. O'Rourke writes on
The Bet.
Specifically, the one between the late Julian Simon and Paul
Ehrlich. You might have heard about that, and know how it came out.
If not, click through and RTWT. But the underlying debate rages.
Some more current data:

In a paper released at the end of last year, Cato scholar and Human Progress Founder Marian Tupy and Brigham Young University economist Gale Pooley describe what they call “The Simon Abundance Index.” Tupy and Pooley created the index by expanding the original wager made by Simon and Ehrlich to include a basket of 50 “foundational commodities” – energy, food, materials, and metals – and by using price data from 1980 to 2017.

Even though the population of the world increased by 69.3% during those 37 years, the price of the 50 commodities declined by 36.3%.

Tupy and Pooley’s conclusion: “Every additional human being born on our planet appears to make resources proportionately more plentiful for the rest of us.”

Make your bets in the commodity market any way you want, but never bet against people.

A good thing to read when you're feeling pessimistic. But remember:
"people" elected our politicians.

The born-again mercantilists and daft neo-nationalists fundamentally misunderstand trade: The benefits of trade are the imports; the exports are the cost. Contemporary trade skeptics — and American nationalist-populists in the Donald Trump mode are not least among them — get it backward. They hear about “trade deficits” and, misunderstanding that term — it is an intentionally misleading one, after all — believe that our trading partners are somehow getting over on us. Difficult as it is to believe in the particular — that you’ve been victimized by your new Mercedes — it somehow feels plausible as an abstraction: They get $50 billion, and we get only $30 billion. Of course, they get only $30 billion worth of actual goods and services, while we get $50 billion worth.

Unilateral free trade may sound like a radical idea, but other countries have had pretty good luck with it, including one that may be of interest to the English: England. When the English rescinded the Corn Laws in the middle of the 19th century, they did not do so as part of a broad and reciprocal agreement with their grain-producing trade partners, some of whom — the French — they didn’t particularly like. They did it because the sensible English finally came to the sensibly English conclusion that English people would be better off as a whole if there were more food coming from more sources at better prices, even if that diminished the earnings of the relatively small cartel of big landowners who had benefited the most from anti-trade measures. Great Britain in fact grew vastly wealthy while maintaining trade arrangements that paid relatively little attention to reciprocity even in principle. British territories, notably Hong Kong, grew wealthy while following much the same model.

Make Britain Great Again!

I've been a Virginia Postrel fanboy for decades, ever since she
edited Reason magazine. She sat for an
interview at
the Writers on Writing website. Part of her answer to a
softball "role of the sane writer in insane times" query:

While I understand the market forces that push writers to feed outrage in order to get traffic, I also feel a civic responsibility to keep my cool, not to attribute motives to people that they wouldn’t themselves recognize, and to think about what might actually persuade people who disagree with me. I don’t always live up to those standards—we all get outraged sometimes—but the older I get and the more history I read, the easier it is to do.

It also helps that, unlike many, perhaps most, female writers, I have never felt either market pressure nor a personal desire to write about my personal experiences and emotions. What interests me is learning and writing about the world.

We need many more writers and thinkers like Ms. Postrel.

And a mini-rant:

I go to the Mental Floss website, since it's supposed to be
aimed at the smarties, and I like to imagine I'm one of them.

And yet, it seems that way too often I get offered articles
like the one headlined…

URLs du Jour

The Democrats have become the party of snobbery. Consider those endless fights over the treatment of evolution in high-school textbooks. Nobody seriously believes that if a high-school science teacher in Muleshoe, Texas, is legally permitted to mention heterodox views of evolution, in 20 years’ time Stanford and MIT will be intellectual backwaters. Those fights aren’t about science — do you hear progressives hounding the Washington Post about its horoscopes or lamenting Obamacare’s blessing of sundry New Age quackeries? — they’re about the loathing of those people. You know the ones: They care a great deal about football and eat at McDonald’s, love guns and Jesus, and probably voted for Trump.

The Republicans have embraced a kind of militant inverted snobbery: “Were you born in a barn?” isn’t a question your Republican mother asks you when you’re behaving poorly — it’s a question the Republican National Committee asks, hopefully, when it is thinking about backing you for Congress.

Things change in politics, and more quickly than you’d think. In 1984, Ronald Reagan won 49 states; Richard Nixon had done the same thing twelve years before him. (Minnesota held out against Reagan, Massachusetts against Nixon.) It is difficult to imagine a Republican doing that today. I blame Rudy Giuliani.

Well, things change. They may change back, but I doubt they'll do so
quickly enough so I'll be around to see it.

DONALD TRUMP is a compulsive insulter. When faced with any criticism or opposition, he resorts instinctively to taunts and put-downs. His smears and invective are so unremitting that they no longer shock. It's simply a given: If you spar with Trump, you'll be slandered by Trump.

For all that, the president's jeers still sometimes manage to set a new low for indecency.

Last Thursday, taking questions from reporters on the White House lawn, Trump was touting his administration's economic record.

"We have the best job numbers in at least 50 years," he claimed. "The economy is incredible. We're negotiating and having tremendous success with China."

Then he abruptly pivoted to his budget dispute with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

I am, of course, no fan of either Chuck or Nancy. But to describe
murderous Chinese dictators as far more honorable than US
politicians is utterly brain-damaged. People who voted for him
should be ashamed. Again.

One hundred years ago [January
16, 1919], Nebraska became the 36th state to ratify the 18th amendment, which set Prohibition in motion a year later. Prohibition is widely, and rightly, remembered as one of the 20th century's greatest policy mistakes, and it contains more than a few lessons that remain relevant today.

The decision by the states and the federal government to outlaw the manufacture, sale, and transportation of most alcohol in the United States was born of racism, nativism, government paternalism, and moralizing religiosity.

Yeah, it was bad. But at least back then, the government felt it
needed an amendment to the Constitution in order to tell
people what substances they could not legally imbibe.

The first reason is that all finance is intertwined with politics.
Banking scholar Charles Calomiris concludes that every banking
system is a deal between the politicians and the bankers. This is so
true. As far as banking and finance go, the 19th century had a
better name for what we call “economics”—they called it “political
economy.”

There will always be political bind spots—risk issues too politically sensitive to address, or which conflict with the desire of politicians to direct credit to favored borrowers. This is notably the case with housing finance and sovereign debt.

The fatal flaw of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) is that being part of the government, lodged right here in the Treasury Department, it is unable to address the risks and systemic risks created by the government itself—and the government, including its central bank—is a huge creator of systemic financial risk.

For example, consider “Systemically Important Financial Institutions” or SIFIs. It is obvious to anyone who thinks about it for at least a minute that the government mortgage institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are SIFIs. If they are not SIFIs, then no one in the world is a SIFI. Yet FSOC has not designated them as such. Why not? Of course the answer is contained in one word: politics.

I'm old enough to remember when it was "obvious" than Fannie and
Freddie were leftover New Dealisms that deserved to die. Sigh. Good times.

URLs du Jour

Gillette, the shaving company, debuted a new commercial this week that assails "toxic masculinity" and challenges men to behave better toward women and each other. But since modern cultural discourse involves two constantly outraged tribes careening wildly from one controversy to the next, this perfectly inoffensive message has somehow been rendered bad by team red.

Well, Robby, it's annoying to be preached to by corporations that
presume to be morally superior.

Also: presuming that an entire group bears the stigma of a subset of
bad apples is invidious stereotyping, a gateway to bigotry.

The Nation, in particular, seems to have shed a few dozen IQ points since November 2016; its voice today is a good deal less Victor Navasky and a good deal more Joan Walsh, which is a good deal for no one. (Not even for Joan Walsh, really.) But The Nation is a bit less predictable than the median hysterical lefty in one interesting way: the skepticism of its writers regarding Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.

In fact, The Nation is broadly defensive of Russia. From Jan. 11, 2019: “Proponents of the Trump–Russia collusion theory wildly overstate their case, again.” From January 9: “What Trump’s Syrian Withdrawal Really Reveals: A wise decision is greeted by denunciations, obstructionism, imperial thinking, and more Russia-bashing.” From Dec. 28, 2018: “New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in U.S. Politics: Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.”

The Nation used to be hilariously pro-Soviet; if you can dig
up P. J. O'Rourke's tale of his 1980s trip to the Soviet Union under
the magazine's auspices, do so.

An Extreme Risk Protection Order Bill (ERPO) has been submitted in
the gun friendly State of New Hampshire…the “Live Free or Die” state.

Jared argues, plausibly, that such bills, which allow judges to "suspend"
(via confiscation) an individual's access to guns, "have only one
intended goal: to circumvent the 2nd Amendment and confiscate guns
from people who are then considered guilty until proven innocent."

At the end of January, someone at the National Shooting Sports Federation asked the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) about non-binary people purchasing firearms. The ATF responded that, despite gender non-binary licenses being acceptable identification, the individual must still select either “male” or “female” on the standard firearm transfer form 4473.

The ATF’s rigid, unreasoned response makes it clear there’s a huge disconnect between the purpose of the form, and the ATF’s interpretation. Form 4473, which everyone must fill out when they purchase a firearm from a federally licensed dealer, is intended to identify the purchaser of the firearm, have them confirm they are legally eligible to receive the firearm, and give enough identifying information to run a background check.

That poses a dilemma for Progressives: do you side with the LGBTQ
people wanting weaponry, or the bureaucrats?

Is it possible that ‘Oumuamua, the nominally cigar-shaped, somewhat mysterious visitor that a Hawaiian telescope spotted leaving our solar system in 2017, might be neither comet nor asteroid but an alien spacecraft? Not a rock whirling through the uncaring void but the fossilized wreck of a magnificent, light-powered starship?

Well … it’s possible. A little bit. Is it likely? Hah. No.

Fun to speculate, though. Assuming it's just an odd-shaped rock, its
mere occurrence means that such objects must be vastly more common
than previously thought.

The Ashtray

(Or the Man Who Denied Reality)

Back in the day, specifically my college days, I read The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn. In fact, it's one of
the few books from that era that I still have on my shelves (I just
looked: yeah, there it is).

You see, Caltech insisted that even us physics geeks had to take one
course per term in non-stem fields: history, English, econ, … or
philosophy. And even though I didn't (still don't) have the type of
brain suited to deep thinking about questions that people have been
thinking about for millennia without getting answers, I said: sure, I'll
take that philosophy of science course.

So I read Kuhn, and I was far more impressed by his argument than I
should have been.

Which was, loosely speaking: during normal, non-revolutionary periods,
scientists operate within the dominant paradigm relevant to their
research field. For example, Ptolemaic astronomers observed the heavens
and hammered their findings into the Ptolemaic geocentric cosmos. With
difficulty, of course, but, hey, science is not easy.

But along comes a revolutionary theory with a new paradigm, like
Copernicus's, that does a better job of describing reality. (Although
the theories, Kuhn said, were 'incommensurable'; you couldn't really
refute or support one via appeals to the other.)
Then we have a paradigm shift, adherents to the old theory either
adapt or die, and the new paradigm establishes its dominance, usually
without literal trips to the guillotine.

About the same time I was inordinately impressed by Kuhn, a grad
student named Errol Morris was at Princeton, enrolled in the Program in
the History and Philosophy of Science, which Kuhn headed. They did not
get on. According to Morris, Kuhn was a petty chain-smoking tyrant,
forbidding him from attending lectures from other competing
philosophers. And things culminated in Kuhn (allegedly) throwing this
book's butt-filled titular object
at Morris's head during a particularly heated "philosophical"
discussion.

So Morris went on to become a famous documentary filmmaker instead of an
obscure philosopher. But he still retained an interest, and (I think
it's fair to say) kind of a grudge, and this book, safely published two
decades after Kuhn's death.

It's a full-throated attack on the Kuhnian viewpoint, which Morris
contends is a hopeless denial of human ability to apprehend reality and
truth, crushed as we are by the weight of our dominant paradigms, only
on occasion to escape, just to be recrushed by the next paradigm
we just shifted to. Morris makes his philosophical case for (instead)
the pursuit of truth "through reason, through observation, through investigation, through thought, through science".

Morris is a political leftie, and his book is kind of interesting also
as a sidelight onto just how radically left academia was back then. He
interviews the late Hilary Putnam, once a proud member of the Maoist
Progressive Labor Party while a Harvard prof. And Noam Chomsky. And he tells of his arrest
while blocking the entrances to the Institute for Defense Analysis near
Princeton back in 1972. Et cetera.

If that were all, this book would be pretty grim and tedious. But
there's a lot of humor too, some pop culture references. Since he's a
filmmaker, Morris knows his flicks: there are long asides discussing
particular aspects of Citizen Kane and The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valence. Numerous footnotes, not quite at the volume
preferred by David Foster Wallace, but close. (One of the footnotes
mentions Morris's fondness for, yes, David Foster Wallace.)
And there are lots of offbeat illustrations, about
one per page. My personal favorite:

We don't often do naked ladies here at Pun Salad, but it's art, so it's
OK. That's "Truth Coming Out of Her Well". She's pissed.

I've seen a number of reviews that suggest Morris may be overstating his
case in his eagerness to trash all things Kuhnian. I am (see what I said
about my brain up there) not one to judge. But this is a relentlessly
entertaining book, especially if you skim over all the philosophical
navel-gazing.

URLs du Jour

About 20 minutes ago (my time), I caught some of Senator Kamala Harris’s road show on Morning Joe. If there were a platitude-eating fungus that rapidly reproduced, by the end of the segment, everyone would have died from the crushing weight of the world’s largest mushroom.

I don’t really take offense at the platitudes, given that we are talking about a politician and also a U.S. senator running for president. What did bug me quite a bit, though, was how she oozed the sense that she was just nailing it. And no, this isn’t a sexist thing. I know we’re in the phase of the asinine conversation when we’re supposed to believe that finding a specific liberal woman annoying or unlikable proves that you hate all women.

I reject all of this and all attempts to bully me into compliance. I belong to the school that says women are human beings, and that means they are distributed up and down the likability scale, just like men. I find Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez likable, but not as likable as Amy Klobuchar, and more likable than Elizabeth Warren. And, just to establish a baseline, compared to, say, the late Helen Thomas (the Stygian goblin who used to roost in the White House press gallery, her scaly talons glistening under the camera lights), they’re all so likable I’d join their cross-country Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants if it meant not sitting next to Thomas on a short flight.

Anyway, former senator Bill Bradley had the same quality as Harris. He’d say something like “Elections are vital to democracy” and then stop talking, as if the audience needed time to absorb the shockwave of a truth bomb of such magnitude. I read somewhere that Bradley didn’t like to hear applause at the end of his speeches because he interpreted silence as a sign of the audience’s awe at his wisdom.

Harris wasn’t that bad, but it was close.

That's a long excerpt, sorry. Didn't know where to stop clipping. Or
start.

But Jonah's point about the similarity between Kamala's rhetoric and
that of Tucker Carlson is spot on: they both embrace the
all-too-convenient notion that "once good-intentioned nationalists
control the knobs and buttons of the state, we’ll fix all of the
problems with our culture." Uh-uh.

This year, the institute blundered badly. It announced in December that the 2019 Shuttlesworth Award would go to Angela Davis, a Birmingham native and longtime political activist. The institute hailed Davis as a “civil rights icon” and claimed that she “has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world.”

In reality, Davis is an extremist, an anti-Semite, and a communist stalwart. She was involved in violence, praised terrorists responsible for the murder of innocent victims, and defended some of the cruelest and most repressive regimes on Earth. To bestow upon Davis an award named for Shuttlesworth — a man who was targeted for assassination yet never abandoned his commitment to nonviolence — struck many of Birmingham’s civic leaders as scandalous.

Read through for Jacoby's documentation of those charges.
(I was
equally
outraged
when the University Near Here
saw fit to invite Davis for its
MLK festivities
ten years ago, but Jacoby's indictment is more complete than the one
I made back then.)

You wouldn’t think that a defense of reason, science, and humanism would be particularly controversial in an era in which those ideals would seem to need all the help they can get. But in the words of a colleague, “You’ve made people’s heads explode!” Many people who have written to me about my 2018 book Enlightenment Now say they’ve been taken aback by the irate attacks from critics on both the right and the left. Far from embracing the beleaguered ideals of the Enlightenment, critics have blamed it for racism, imperialism, existential threats, and epidemics of loneliness, depression, and suicide.They have insisted that human progress can only be an illusion of cherry-picked data. They have proclaimed, with barely concealed schadenfreude, that the Enlightenment is an idea whose time has passed, soon to be killed off by authoritarian populism, social media, or artificial intelligence.

Never fear, says Steve: I was, and still am, right about everything.
(You might find this sort of attitude to be arrogant and
off-putting, I kind of find it charming.)

Locals can go see Prof Pinker and his famous hair January 30 at the
Music Hall in
Portsmouth. Each 1-2 tickets include a (mandatory) voucher for the
book, so that's actually a disincentive for people who already own
the book, like me.

Finally: You'd think the high-class site Quillette would have
high-class commenters. You'd be wrong about that.

Are you a man? That is to say, are you a genetic male who also happens to identify as a "man," for some increasingly antiquated reason? If so, are you under the mistaken impression that you're not a rapist?

Our society has come a long way in shaming men for behaving in any way that anybody anywhere doesn't like, and reminding men that we're all complicit even if we don't behave that way. But it's not nearly enough. The mere fact of maleness is shameful and problematic. Men and boys everywhere need to be reminded that we're evil. We must learn to hate ourselves as much as everyone else hates us. The patriarchy must be castrated.

And who better to do it than a company that makes razors?

I'm tempted to boycott, except I've got about a six-month supply of
disposable Mach 3 razors in my bathroom cupboard. And a can of Foamy
that lasts about that long too. Even if they could detect my
boycott, it wouldn't have any effect until this summer. By which time
this whole thing will have blown over, I hope.

Or maybe I could just grow a beard. Another thing the
heirs of
King
wouldn't
notice.

The president of the United States has many faults, but let’s not ignore this one: He cannot write sentences. If a tree falls in a forrest and no one is there to hear it … wait: Pretty much all of you noticed that mistake, right? Yet Wednesday morning, the president did not; he released a tweet referring to “forrest fires” twice, as if these fires were set by Mr. Gump. Trump’s serial misuse of public language is one of many shortcomings that betray his lack of fitness for the presidency.

I subscribed to the late Richard Mitchell's Underground
Grammariannewsletter for
years. He liked quoting
Ben
Jonson:

Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune, whose words do jar;
nor his reason in frame whose sentence is preposterous; nor his
elocution clear and perfect, whose utterance breaks itself into
fragments and uncertainties.

Toss Your Cookies

Some sites (like the Boston Globe) are pretty nasty about letting
you have access to a severely limited number of "free" pages. They do
this by leaving web cookies on your computer so they can recognize your
browser when it returns for more content.

You can try opening such sites in Incognito mode (or whatever the
equivalent is in non-Chrome browsers), but they can detect that and
give you a nastypage instead of the desired content.

For the same reason, extensions that allow you to reject cookies from
selected sites also produce chiding messages: you must accept cookies to
see our stuff!

You can probably search out and destroy these sites' cookies once
they're on your computer
by following the instructions for your browser.
Here's
what you do in Chrome, for example. Works, but there's a lot of tedious
pointy-clicky.

My current workaround is (so far) working pretty well for me, a
one-click solution: a Chrome extension called
RemoveCookiesForSite.
It simply displays a broken cookie, probably to the right of the title
bar. Once you're viewing a site that insists on dropping cookies on you,
just click on that. Voila, cookies gone without any fuss, and the site
is none the wiser.

This may screw up the revenue models of some sites. Sorry!
I'mRetiredOnAFixedIncome!

URLs du Jour

[…] Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market
capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a
staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our
system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings.
We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic
system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A
system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.

This is simultaneously obviously true from one perspective and glaringly and outrageously false from another. And it dismays me that so many conservatives haven’t bothered to defend the free market more vigorously in the responses to this debate.

Look at it this way: Guns are tools. This is literally far more true about firearms than it is about the free market, because while both are to a certain extent artificial things, guns are actual physical devices bought and sold in the market. And yet, who among us, including Carlson, would deny that the right to self-defense is more than merely a tool?

Jonah went into more detail in his recent
podcast
with Michael Strain, recommended.

Yes, you can shoehorn the concept of "market capitalism", very
awkwardly, into the
"tool" category. But it's also, more importantly, a fundamental part
of individual liberty. People deserve, within very broad limits, the
freedom to engage in non-fraudulent mutually voluntary exchange. Any
limits on this freedom should need strong justification.

And (by the way) if you're looking to aim your rhetorical weaponry at what "weakens
and destroys families", there are more obvious targets than the
economic system.

The Concord Monitor is extremely unsatisfied with the
new rule in the New Hampshire House banning members from bringing
weaponry into the chambers, the cloakroom, and the gallery. And it rang our LFOD Google Alert:
Give House gun ban more teeth.

Violating the weapons ban can result in ejection from the House or
arrest on disorderly conduct charges, but the rule enacted by the
Democratic majority set the stage for confusion and conflict because
it forbids House security officers from stopping and searching
members believed to be armed. That was a mistake. Even in the
Live Free or Die state, the State House, a landmark visited regularly by schoolchildren, like a courthouse or airport, is no place for amateurs carrying concealed weapons.

For the love of God, I beg you to think about the [visiting
school]children!

The Monitor lives up to its “Pravda on the Merrimack”
nickname with its "solution": make violation of the rule a felony.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin once labeled writers and other creative people “engineers of the soul.” In his passion to control what people saw and read, Stalin both coddled artists and enforced unanimity through the instruments of a police state. Today, fortunately, we don’t face such overt forms of cultural control, but the trends in American and to some extent European mass culture are beginning to look almost Stalinesque in their uniformity. This becomes painfully obvious during awards season, when the tastes and political exigencies of the entertainment industry frequently overpower any sense of popular preferences, or even artistic merit.

Joel notes the happy result: ratings for the Oscars at their lowest
ever; a 25-year low in movie attendance.

And only one movie out now that I even have the slightest
inclination toward seeing: (The Mule).
And, even for that one, I'll probably wait for Netflix to cough up
the DVD.

Caltech physics dude Sean Carroll summarizes
True
Facts About Cosmology. And this is not some Deepak Chopra
bullshit, you can take Sean's "true facts" to the bank. They are
cutting edge, state of the art, best of breed. And a few more
clichés I can't think of right now.

And for me, the most eye-opening facts are the facts we don't know.
Facts 4 and 5 of 19 total:

The Big Bang might have been the beginning of the universe. Or it might not have been; there could have been space and time before the Big Bang. We don’t really know.

Even if the BB was the beginning, the universe didn’t “pop into existence.” You can’t “pop” before time itself exists. It’s better to simply say “the Big Bang was the first moment of time.” (If it was, which we don’t know for sure.)

Somewhat comforting to know that there's still stuff even the most
advanced researchers don't know about the universe. Is it stuff we
can never know?

The Phony Campaign

2019-01-13 Update

So what happened in the past week?
Julian
Castro and Hillary Clinton (again) have broken onto our
Phony Campaign leader board. Julian has
a 5% nomination probability according to
Predictwise,
well over our 3% criterion.
In addition to Julian, Hillary Clinton edges back into our table
this week. Gone for now are Tim Kaine and Paul Ryan.

A double
Google glitch has leapfrogged Beto O'Rourke and Nikki Haley over
Donald Trump in phony Google hits. This will not last.

Paul Mirengoff at Power
Line notes: Two
obscure Dems enter presidential race. One is the previously
mention Julian Castro, dismissed as a "standard issue left-wing
Democrat." (From what I saw on the news: leaning heavily on his
ethnicity.)

But Tulsi is a tad more interesting:

Gabbard is a bit unorthodox for a Democrat. Her American Conservative Union ratings usually flirt with double digits, which is unusual for a congressional Dem. Her Hawaii colleagues Mazie Hirono and Brian Schatz struggle to exceed zero. Conservative Review once gave Gabbard a rating of 20 percent, the same number it gave Lisa Murkowski.

Unfortunately (as Paul further notes), she's also been a
"stooge" in the recent past for Bashar al Assad. (Co-stooging with
Dennis Kucinich.)

Julian's previous elective offices: mayor of San
Antonio (2009-2014); San Antonio City Councilman (2001-2005).
And he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (2014-2017).
That's a pretty thin résumé. Anyway he was fed a softball query from
George Stephanopoulos:

Anchor George Stephanopoulos, noting Castro's lack foreign policy experience, asked him what he believes is the "greatest national threat" and what qualifies him to tackle the issue.

"Well, I believe that today, the greatest threat to our national security is the fact that this president, as one of your previous guests has said, is damaging the relationships that we’ve had in place in the post-World War II era, whether it's NATO or other alliances with individual countries that have kept us safer," Castro said. "The first thing that I would do if I were president with regard to our relationships around the world is to strengthen them, because those alliances have helped keep us safe."

Stephanopoulos pressed Castro on what makes him qualified to be the next commander in chief.

"Well, I—as I said earlier, I think that being mayor of a large city and serving in the president's cabinet certainly qualifies one to be commander in chief, and I'm going to go out there and make the case," Castro said.

Okay, Julian. If you say so. I have to admit, that might be a better
answer than Trump had four years ago.

Jim Geraghty is back with
15
Things You Didn’t Know, this week's subject being Elizabeth
Warren. All 15 are interesting (but I knew some of them), here's an
interesting tidbit:

4) In his autobiography Stress Test, President Obama’s first treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, portrays Warren as an empty suit, full of criticism but short on serious alternative proposals. Her “oversight hearings often felt more like made-for-YouTube inquisitions than serious inquiries,” he writes. “She was worried about the right things but she was better at impugning our choices — as well as our intentions and our competence — than identifying any feasible alternatives.”

Geithner describes a meeting with Warren in which he said, “At some point, you should tell me what you propose we do,” and she admitted she hadn’t really thought about what specifically should change in the administration’s approach.

Of course, other Obama-administration officials have contended that Geithner “hated her,” for both personal and ideological reasons.

The link above goes to a very pro-Warren 2011 article at Vanity Fair.

But is she likeable? I'm not one to say. I have a sterling
record of liking presidential candidates that everyone else thinks
are unlikeable: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Fred Thompson,…

I’m a conservative, so I don’t really worry about whether I’ve offended liberal feminists. I don’t have a problem saying that Warren is unlikeable. She seems preachy and angry to me. Actually, she’s a combination of some of the horrible math teachers I endured in middle school, and a friend’s overly emotional mom.

This might sound pretty specific, but we’ve all met people like Warren. She’s an archetype of a genre that I’m pretty sure would turn off a lot of voters. What is more, she increasingly looks like a phony—a problem she is reinforcing by trying to copy Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s Instagram game.

This is not an indictment of powerful women, but of Elizabeth Warren. I’m a fan of Nikki Haley. And though I’m no more ideologically simpatico to Nancy Pelosi, Krysten Sinema, or AOC than I am to Warren, the aforementioned progressive women seem kind of charming to me.

The government may still be shut down, but Congress is finally back in session, and Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) has seized the opportunity to introduce her latest legislative reform, the awkwardly named Livable Incomes for Families Today (LIFT) the Middle Class Act.

The bill, in brief, would offer all families earning less than $100,000 as much as $6,000 in refundable tax credits.

The problems being: (1) it seriously impacts the deficit (a "10-year
price tag of $2.7 trillion"); (2) although Kamala has said she wants to
make it revenue-neutral (meaning huge tax increases on other people;
(3) the details of the tax credit phase-out would subject people to
a huge marginal tax rate, with accompanying work disincentive; (4)
it is needlessly duplicative of the existing Earned Income Tax
Credit; while (5) adding more complication to an already too-complex
tax code.

In other words: it seems more like campaign boob-bait than a serious
policy proposal.

Even before reading the article, I'm thinking: 1. So everybody got into the room (no overflow room, no people left outside in the parking lot), 2. What size was the room (unless it was a big arena, what's the big deal about filling a room)? 3. Filling "to the rafters" is a metaphor, visualizing people piled on top of each other, but of course that didn't happen, so how densely packed was the room? 4. Of course, there's a fire code, so they couldn't pack a room all that much, 5. WaPo sounds silly saying "fill events to the rafters," when I think all they mean is that some people are showing up for events.

The WaPo employs Democrat shills as reporters, and has lazy
editors who can't shear their copy of what Ann calls "old-time adman
language".

This week Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) announced the latest version of her "assault weapon" ban. "Americans across the nation are asking Congress to reinstate the federal ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines," she claims. "If we're going to put a stop to mass shootings and protect our children, we need to get these weapons of war off our streets."

Feinstein has not posted the text of her bill yet, but it sounds a lot like the 2017 version. The 2019 bill, like the previous one, bans "205 military-style assault weapons by name," along with any firearm that "accepts a detachable ammunition magazine and has one or more military characteristics," such as "a pistol grip, a forward grip, a barrel shroud, a threaded barrel or a folding or telescoping stock." It also "exempts by name more than 2,200 guns for hunting, household defense or recreational purposes," which is supposed to show us how generous Feinstein is being. But this list, which consumed nearly 100 pages of the 2017 bill, is completely gratuitous, since any gun that's not banned by name and does not fit the general definition would remain legal regardless of whether the bill said so explicitly.

It's not really, by the rules of ordinary English usage, a "ban",
since current owners of the scary weaponry would be able to keep
them.

For now. That's the understood context.

I am pretty sure I would be considered a "right wing extremist",
advocating, as I do, drastically limited government, fiscal sanity,
traditional morality, …

>We have been hearing for some years now how domestic political pressure has hamstrung needful actions against “far-right extremist groups,” which, we are also told, represent a larger and more serious terrorism threat than do the various jihadist groups with which we have become too familiar over the past — can you believe it has been that long? — 18 years.

Inevitably, this invites the question: “What’s a right-wing extremist group?” From lawyer Jill Filipovic, a fellow at the New America Foundation, we have an answer: the Knights of Columbus. That the Knights of Columbus is a right-wing extremist group is not an idea from the fringe: Filipovic’s New America colleagues include Anne-Marie Slaughter and David Brooks, which is not to say that she speaks for them, but she isn’t some person wandering the street with a sandwich board, either. In the Senate, Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono have proceeded in accord with Filipovic’s view, suggesting that a federal judiciary nominee should be disqualified from the bench because of his membership in the Catholic philanthropic group.

Crazy, right? Someone with cross-examination skills at least on a
par with Senators Kamala/Mazie should demand a straight answer
to the question: Shoud membership in the Knights of Columbus be a
red-flag disqualification for Federal judicial appointments?

A Reddit user who claims to be a Google insider involved in firing former Google engineer James Damore on Tuesday spilled his guts about the internal decisions that led to Damore's termination.

Damore was let go in August 2017 after internally publishing a memo criticizing the company's "ideological echo chamber" and outlining his views on how gender differences affect females in STEM fields.

Damore says (and I quote): "Whoah, this would explain a lot." The
alleged insider seems to have a lot of knowledge you would expect an
insider to have.

While details of Ocasio-Cortez’s energy proposal are unavailable, former Green-party presidential candidate Jill Stein has proposed a “Green New Deal” costing between $700 billion and $1 trillion per year for public jobs and clean energy initiatives. That is roughly 4 percent of GDP.

And when assessing the needed tax revenues, a green-energy initiative costing $7–$10 trillion over the decade should be examined in the context of$42 trillion in additional Democratic-socialist proposals that include single-payer health care ($32 trillion), a federal jobs guarantee ($6.8 trillion), student-loan forgiveness ($1.4 trillion), free public college ($800 billion), infrastructure ($1 trillion), family leave ($270 billion), and Social Security expansion ($188 billion).

That 21 percent of GDP cost would double federal spending. And that does not even account for a baseline budget deficit rising to 7 percent of GDP over the decade — bringing the total budget gap to 28 percent of GDP.

The revenue-raising proposals made by AOC are totally inadequate to
fund any of that. Of course. As Brian notes, the proposals are
mostly hot air meant to fire up their I-was-told-there-would-be-no-math supporters.
Providing anything more concrete would end the discussion.
"If the numbers added up, the Left would have produced them."

Ocasio-Cortez’s problem isn’t that she’s stupid, or that she’s a compulsive liar; she just got famous before she got wise. But neither is she being oppressed by the power structure — subjected to heightened scrutiny because she’s a woman, or browbeaten by ignorant slaves to neoliberalism who ought to study up on Modern Monetary Theory so they can grasp the revolutionary brilliance of her fiscal ideas.

Intellectually, this is about on par with … well, with believing the United States spends more than $2 trillion a year on defense. Some of her critics are female, after all, and we’re not all victims of patriarchal false consciousness. Rather, we have some familiarity with the federal budget, and with monetary economics, and after careful consideration, have concluded that the parts of the Modern Monetary Theory that are true aren’t interesting, while the bits that are interesting aren’t true. And thus, that Ocasio-Cortez’s fiscal prescriptions are reckless bunkum.

Megan seems to think that AOC will eventually move on to firmer
ground tnan (for example) her July assertion that "unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs."
Maybe, but that prediction seems very similar to the hopeful belief
that President Trump would reel in his shoot-from-the-lip style.
In both cases, we can ask: when's that supposed to happen?

And they provide, for the transgressor ("you made an offensive joke
about bisexual Muppets in 1997") the Rite of Perpetual Confession.

"Create in me a clean heart, O Mob, and renew a leftist spirit
within me. Cast me not away from employment, and take not your Holy
Oscar from me. Restore to me the joy of activism and uphold me with
thy progressivism."

Further liturgical stylings at the link. "In the name of the Ruth,
the Bader, and the Ginsburg."

At Power Line, John Hinderaker links to a
Daily
Mail article referring to
The
Great Issue of Our Time…. Specifically, the (long) headline
reads: "Putting the Pi in pies: Twitter user stuns the internet with
math that proves one 18-inch pizza has more in it than TWO 12-inch
helpings".

Yes. As John notes, if the pizza diameters are in a (18/12) = 1.5
ratio, the ratio of the total areas is 1.52 = 2.25. So
a single
18-inch pizza has 12.5% more area than two 12-inchers.

This is, at best, high school math. Yet, people are stunned, or at
least claim to be.
Including, perhaps, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Somebody should ask
her.

Famed winemakers Gina Gallo and Jean-Charles Boisset, a married couple with twin 7-year-old daughters who seldom have time to travel to such events together, will be there in tandem this year (a treat for anyone who knows wine). French-born Boisset says New Hampshire speaks to his passions.

“New Hampshire represents freedom,” he said. “Look at the state
motto: Live Free or Die. It’s so fun to be able to believe in this — that sense of where everything is vivacious and daring, where you truly are free.”

My taste in wine is non-existent, I'm fine with anything that's even
slightly better than plonk. And I've been cutting way back, just to
lose some weight. Still, Gina and Jean-Charles might convince me to
splurge with their nice words about LFOD…

Stubborn Attachments

A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals

A short book, a mere $9.99 for the Kindle version at Amazon, and there's
a nice feature: the author, Tyler Cowen, pledges to
donate
the receipts from the book to "Yonas", an Ethiopian tour guide he
befriended during a visit. That was enough for me to cough up for the
Kindle version instead of raiding the UNH library.

Tyler's pitch is for making economic growth, constrained by
a healthy respect for individual liberty, our primary social
goal. There are a few asterisks on that: he's really talking about the
growth of "Wealth Plus", which factors in the values of sustainability,
environmental quality, and leisure. Given that, though, he notes that
the difference between (say) sustained 1% annual growth vs. 3% may seem
trivial over the course of a year: $100 becomes $101 instead of $103. But
after 100 years, it's $270 vs. $1921. (Assuming I can still do the
math correctly.) Can you really deny your ancestors
the benefit of that additional wealth?

Well, maybe. There's a possible counterargument: would you rather have
$100 today or $100 next year? Obviously, today, amirite?
Time value of money. So future-money is
worth less than today-money. Doesn't that say we should be optimizing
the here-and-now rather than the hazy future? Tyler makes a meticulous
argument that it's not relevant; carrying things to their logical
conclusions quickly run afoul of common-sense morality.
(Similar arguments apply to running the thought experiments backwards in
time; a $100 wrong done to someone in the past rapidly grows to
vast sums today. Again, common-sense morality rejects the conclusion.)

Finally, how do we incorporate uncertainty into the mix? How can
we take any actions today that will (almost certainly) have unforeseen
consequences in the near or far future?

Tyler's book is a fine example of mixing philosophical and economic
arguments. I was probably not as skeptical as I should have been; when
it comes to arguments for prosperity, responsibility, and rights, those
arguments are pretty much pushing on an open door.

URLs du Jour

2019-01-10

I suppose we should talk about
Tucker
Carlson's Fox news monologue from last week, which itself
was a response to Mitt Romney's Trump-trashing op-ed in the
WaPo. A random excerpt:

At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be gone, too. The country will remain. What kind of country will be it be then? How do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that matter.

The answer used to be obvious. The overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones, or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They haven’t so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. And yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot.

The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity. It’s happiness. There are a lot of ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children. They’re what our leaders should want for us, and would want if they cared.

But our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.

As someone who looks forward to getting the occasional Amazon box
containing plastic garbage from China, I don't entirely agree.

On the other hand: I agree that happiness is a worthy social goal.
That isn't, or at least shouldn't be, a disputed fact in a country
whose founding document contended that the pursuit of happiness was
one of the big three inalienable rights of individuals.

For more on that, see Charles Murray, at right.

So (basically) Tucker's commentary had something for everyone to
either adore or despise. On balance, though, Kevin D. Williamson was
negative about
Tucker Carlson’s Vacuous Populism.

Tucker Carlson says that conservatives are operating with blinders, that “the idea that families are being crushed by market forces never seems to occur to them.” Perhaps it is the case that the possibility has occurred to them, and that the proposition has been examined and found to be untrue. Carlson mocks the idea that lower prices for consumer goods — “plastic garbage from China,” in the popular banal formulation — are in the interests of Americans of more modest means; I would like to suggest, in all charity and friendship, that those Americans who are literally counting their pennies could do with hearing a good deal less about the triviality of low prices from a born-rich multimillionaire who never had to literally count pennies. If you have ever known a family who — and this is a real-life example — used to dread receiving Christmas presents because they could not afford the postage to send a thank-you note, then you know what lower prices can mean to real people.

KDW's article is longish, and refers to other participants in the
discussion at NR and elsewhere.

There haven't been nearly enough conservatives
demanding Trump explain why he waited for two years, until Democrats
controlled the house, to take this stand about the wall. Nice speech
last night. He could have given it a year ago. Why didn't
he?

Along those lines, it's nearly ideal that the federal sick-out has begun among TSA employees, since their agency is so astoundingly incompetent and abusive at its assigned tasks and is skilled only at angering travelers of all political persuasions. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) may be more explicitly malevolent, but their fans and detractors tend to break down along ideological lines. Even the Internal Revenue Service can find boosters among whoever it is who keeps weeping over those regurgitated press releases about how hard it is to be a tax collector. But sharing vicious comments about the TSA clowns squeezingpeople'sjunk is a game we can all play while suffering in line at the airport.

Not that there's any point to all of that groping beyond the purely recreational aspect. Undercover investigators were able to smuggle weapons and explosives past TSA agents 95 percent of the time, according to a 2015 Homeland Security Investigator General report. Maybe that's because agents are relying on dowsing rods or Spidey sense—they're certainly not depending on the expensive equipment they make travelers and baggage file through.

With the government shutdown in effect, life has felt incomplete for many Americans. “Everything is just too easy—it’s boring,” said restaurant owner Gloria Morgan, “and I realized it’s because we’re missing an essential challenge in life: soulless bureaucrats posing arbitrary rules on us.”

One of the primary functions of the government is to ignorantly muck around in the business of others, but the shutdown has hampered that. Thus citizens have been forced to try to fill that void themselves. “Today I just suddenly decided large sodas weren’t allowed,” said Morgan. “It was an annoying, pointless obstacle the whole day—it was like the government was still around.”

Fortunately, New Hampshire legislator
Judith
Spang is available to fill the breach, still being paid ($400/year) to force people to behave
the way she thinks they should.

Maynard, who had an ill-fated romance with Salinger in 1972 when he was 53 and she was nineteen, first told her story in the scandalous 1999 memoir, At Home in the World; it earned her both notoriety and opprobrium for invading the reclusive writer’s privacy. The book certainly painted Salinger in a mostly unflattering light—as a self-centered domineering crank, albeit capable of “sweetness and tenderness.” The 2018 essay went much further. This time, Maynard—who expressed disappointment that the #MeToo movement had not led to a re-examination of her story—depicted her experience with Salinger as not just a bad relationship but essentially a violation. She also charged that the criticism she faced twenty years ago was a grotesquely sexist backlash in defense of a famous abuser.

I've never been able to fathom why people find Joyce Maynard
interesting, but that's me. Clearly, J. D. did, for a while anyway.

URLs du Jour

In her column at The Week (or should that be the
Week?), Shikha Dalmia urges us to
Remember the Kurds.

Americans are understandably war weary. Therefore, contrary to the claims of foreign policy hawks, President Trump's decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria wasn't too soon — but not soon enough.

But that doesn't mean that America can simply walk away, leaving the Syrian Kurds, who aided our efforts against ISIS, more vulnerable than when it intervened. The best way of arranging their security is by letting all those who want to flee come to America.

Shikha recounts the long sorry history of United States' (and,
generally, the West's) foreign
policy screwing over the Kurds, "the group most used and abused."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is making headlines calling for raising the top individual income tax rate to 70 percent to fund a Green New Deal. Sympathetic commentators are saying that such a high rate on the wealthy is no big deal because the top tax rate used to be 70 percent and above. Noah Smith at Bloombergsays the congresswomen’s plan would be “a return to the 20th century norm.”

The problem is that globalization has dramatically changed the economy over recent decades. High tax rates were not a good idea back then, but they would be disastrous now.

Advocates for high tax rates make a big deal about the marginal
utility of income: an additional dollar is worth less to a
millionaire than it is to a poorer person.

But they never seem to apply that lesson at the other end. The
WaPo's
analysis
of AOC's proposal estimates it would at most generate $72 billion of increased
government revenue per year. The FY2019
estimate
for total government revenue is
$3422 billion. In other words: we're talking a 2% effect (again, at
most). What's the marginal utility of that?

But, as Chris Edwards points out, it wouldn't work even by the left
wing's own
standards.

Today the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) offered a set of ambitious,
achievable regulatory reform goals for the 116th Congress. The
report, Free to
Prosper, identifies ways for Congress to clear
away federal regulations that needlessly interfere in American lives
and livelihoods, making it harder for consumers to get the best
products and services and harder for American businesses to succeed
and compete in a global economy.

There are a lot of them, and they deserve the serious consideration
that they probably won't get.
Example:

Congress should:

Repeal Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

Repeal Sections 201 and 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.

Yes. Do that.

David Harsanyi's column helpfully pictures the map on the wall of
new Congresscritter Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) with a post-it indicating
where she thinks "Palestine" should be. (Somewhere around Cairo,
apparently, but my guess is that she really wants it a few hundred
miles ENE of there.) For the rest of us, David points out:
Yes, Anti-Zionism Is The Same As Anti-Semitism.

In a recent New York Times op-ed titled “Anti-Zionism isn’t the same as Anti-Semitism,” columnist Michelle Goldberg defended Ilhan Omar, a newly elected House representative who has claimed that Jews have hypnotized the world for their evil works. A person can oppose “Jewish ethno-nationalism without being a bigot,” Goldberg explained. “Indeed,” she went on, “it’s increasingly absurd to treat the Israeli state as a stand-in for Jews writ large, given the way the current Israeli government has aligned itself with far-right European movements that have anti-Semitic roots.”

It’s true, of course, that anti-Zionism isn’t “the same” as common anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism is the most significant and consequential form of anti-Semitism that exists in the world today. Anti-Zionism has done more to undermine Jewish safety than all the ugly tweets, dog whistles, and white nationalist marches combined. It is the predominant justification for violence, murder, and hatred against Jews in Europe and the Middle East. And it’s now infiltrating American politics.

As has been observed before: there are a lot of countries in the
world, many with (to put it mildly) checkered pasts, and quite a few
with current horrors. But "Anti-Zionists" aim their ire exclusively at the
country that just happens to be Jewish. Geez, what a coincidence!

Around 2038, less than 20 years out, total spending on the major entitlements — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — plus interest on the debt will exceed all federal tax revenue. Put another way, come 2038, if we put every dollar Uncle Stupid collects in taxes toward Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt, all of that money combined will not cover those expenses.

Fiscal Armageddon is coming.

Which is to say: If the federal government does not do something to reform its long-term finances, then a fiscal crisis of some sort is inevitable. No one knows exactly what it will look like, and no one knows what the consequences will be when a country responsible for about a quarter of the human race’s total economic output becomes insolvent. Hard to say, really, how that will shake out. Safe to say it will be ugly.

KDW suggests we not "sit around waiting for the bomb to go off."
Unfortunately, nearly all members of the political class find it in
their interests to … sit around waiting for the bomb to go off.

"The overall cancer death rate dropped continuously from 1991 to 2016 by a total of 27 percent, translating into approximately 2,629,200 fewer cancer deaths than would have been expected if death rates had remained at their peak," notes the American Cancer Society (ACS) in its latest annual update of cancer mortality and incidence statistics. In 1991, the cancer death rate stood at 215 per 100,000 people and has fallen in 2016 to 156 per 100,000 people. The report also notes that the cancer death rate between 2007 and 2016 for both women and men declined annually by 1.4 and 1.8 percent, respectively.

Neat! I may live long enough to see the fiscal armageddon! Or not:

The report notes that the disparity between men and women is
possibily associated with sex differences in immune function and
response. Adult height is also positively associated with cancer
incidence and mortality in both men and women, and has been
estimated to account for one-third of the sex disparity.

‘Live free or die, but don’t get high’ seems to be the new state motto now that Granite Staters have found themselves surrounded by fellow New England states – Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts – as well as the country of Canada, which are all now much more lenient than New Hampshire when it comes to marijuana.

You can participate in a poll on the topic, but it seems that you need to
register.

What if a simple policy could save tens of thousands of people every year from a deeply unpleasant treatment followed by early death? A policy that would disproportionately help the most disadvantaged? While actually saving taxpayer money?

That’s a pretty rare combination; presumably you’d be pretty excited. But what if the policy involved paying people to donate one of their kidneys to a stranger?

Possibly you are now less excited. Possibly you are now picturing a sci-fi dystopia where the poor serve as organ farms for the wealthy. Which is what such people as Gabriel Danovitch worry about.

Danovitch is medical director of the Kidney and Pancreas Transplant
Program at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, and he's very much
opposed to people profiting from organ donation. Megan rebuts his
concerns, effectively in my view.

URLs du Jour

Brink has some nasty things to say about President Trump and some snide things to say about libertarians. That tells me who he’s prepared to subtract from the Republican Party, so that he can feel better about supporting it. But whatever this might achieve in terms of crawling out of the hole intellectually, I don’t see how it can do anything other than put Republicans deeper in the hole electorally.

Brink's advice may be read
here.
Read that if you'd like, but I feel he's underestimating the
difficulty of competing with Democrats by offering shiny free
goodies to the citizenry. If you offer 16, the Democrats will
counter with 32.

Rep. Judith Spang isn’t afraid to tell you what she thinks about all those terrible plastic shopping bags you’re using at the grocery store—even if you’re a total stranger.

“I was walking out of the grocery store and I saw a woman with so many plastic bags in her cart it looked like it was about to take flight,” Rep. Spang told NHJournal. “She appeared to be an upscale person, so I approached her, held up my [reusable] bag and said ‘Hey—how about trying one of these?’”

Yes, Judith Spang is the kind of person who wants to tell you
how to run your life to her satisfaction. And to channel
Monty
Python: she's not only proud of that, she's downright smug about
it.

President Trump's recent threat to use "the military version of eminent domain" to seize property for his border wall highlights the ways in which building the wall would harm the property rights of Americans. Less widely recognized is the fact that the wall policy is just part of a larger pattern of administration policy initiatives and legal positions that threaten property rights on multiple fronts.

Immigration is one issue where my inner Schrödinger's Cat puts me
more on the conservative side of the conservative/libertarian split.
But the wall is stupid, and not just for its potential for eminent
domain abuse..

But RTWT for the story on other issues impacting property rights as
well.

If President Trump begins to imitate Barack Obama in issuing dubious executive orders and trampling on private-property rights, he could find himself in trouble even with portions of his base.

Changing tactics would be the best way for Trump to end the stalemate that has shut down one-fourth of the government for more than two weeks. He should brand Congress as irresponsible on the issue of border security and say he’s been forced to direct the Defense Department to use some of its unallocated funds for border construction projects.

Doing it that way, the president would probably score points on the political argument and ensure that, come the 2020 election, he will have actually built something along the border rather than just talking about it.

Also would have the desirable side effect of making Democrats
sputter incoherently. Not that they are having trouble with that
currently.

During an interview on "60 Minutes," Anderson Cooper put this question to Ocasio-Cortez: "When people hear the word socialism, they think Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela. Is that what you have in mind?"

Her response: "Of course not. What we have in mind — and what of my — and my policies most closely resemble what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden."

IBD notes, yes, that many policies in those countries are
actually more capitalist than the US's status quo. While
the US ranks #6 on Cato's/Fraser's
Economic
Freedom of the World, the UK is number 9, Norway is 25, Finland
22, Sweden 43.

Hawaii regains the title of healthiest state this year, after dropping to No. 2 in 2017. This is Hawaii’s ninth year in the No. 1 spot since 1990 when the health rankings were first published. The state has been No 1. four of the past five years. Massachusetts is No. 2, Connecticut No. 3, Vermont No. 4 and Utah No. 5. These same states ranked in the top five in 2017.

… and New Hampshire makes the number 6 spot. Despite all the opioid
overdosing.
(But beware, the
methodology
used has a number of factors that at best only
indirectly reflect actual health.)

The man behind two of the most memorable American songs of the past
half-century died last month. Norman Gimbel composed lyrics for “The
Girl From Ipanema” and “Killing Me Softly.” But if you grew up in
the 1970s and ’80s, you may be more familiar with his less
prestigious songs: the themes to “Happy Days” and “Laverne & Shirley.”

If you are of a Certain Age, Mr. Scalia will almost certainly jog
some pleasant memories for you. For me it was Johnny Mathis and
Deniece Williams singing the Family Ties theme: "Show me that
smile again…". Sigh.

URLs du Jour

In December, England's chief medical officer, Sally Davies, urged the nation to adopt still more "taxes on unhealthy food high in sugar and salt." This was just months after England's soda tax took hold.

"Those sectors that damage health must pay for their harm or subsidise healthier choices," Davies says in a report that suggests the tax money should be used to underwrite purchases of fruits and vegetables.

Davies's argument came just days after details of a draft British government proposal to institute byzantine calorie restrictions on a variety of foods.

Blimey! And this is under a Tory government? Winston Churchill must
be rolling in his grave, then asking for a cigar and a whisky.

On the other hand, we can also honestly point out that if we had
made different choices, things could have turned out a lot worse.
Don't we deserve credit for our good choices, and deserve the
resulting outcome? Sure.

Anyway, Shermer's article examines the concept up and down. His
bottom line:

In the end, if the cosmic dice rolled in your favor, how should you feel? Modest pride in one’s hard work is no vice, but boastful arrogance at one’s good fortune is no virtue. Cultivate gratitude. What if you’ve been unlucky in life? There is consolation in the fact that studies show in the long run what’s important is not success so much as living a meaningful life, which is the result of having family and friends, setting long-range goals, meeting challenges with courage and conviction and, as Polonius advised (Hamlet Act 1, scene 3): “this above all: to thine own self be true.”

That year—2014—three young quantum gravity
researchers came to an astonishing realization. They were working in
physicists’ theoretical playground of choice: a toy universe called “anti-de Sitter space” that
works like a hologram. The bendy fabric of space-time in the
interior of the universe is a projection that emerges from entangled
quantum particles living on its outer boundary. Ahmed Almheiri, Xi
Dong and Daniel Harlow did calculations suggesting that
this holographic “emergence” of space-time works just like a quantum
error-correcting code. They conjectured in the Journal of High Energy
Physics that space-time itself is a code—in anti-de Sitter
(AdS) universes, at least. The paper has triggered a wave of
activity in the quantum gravity community, and new quantum
error-correcting codes have been discovered that capture more
properties of space-time,

For better or worse, we don't live in an anti-De Sitter universe.
Ours is plain old de Sitter, where expansion will go on forever, and
things will eventually get very boring. Fortunately, we're living in
more interesting times.

Diet No. 3: Atkins. This was popular for a while, and some people still swear by it, which is to say they shout "$*#(@#SON OF A #(@# I want a French fry!" You can't have carbs. That means very little bread, sugar, potatoes or any of the other things that give life meaning.

Downside: you will actually find yourself uttering strange things, like, "I am so incredibly sick of bacon." It seems unlikely anyone could utter those words in seriousness, but there you are, staring at another plate of bacon, and you realize you would pay $9 for a frozen Eggo, even though you suspect they are made out of wood pulp. You want bread so bad you go to the garage with a bag of croutons and huff the crumbs.

I did Atkins for a year and lost so much weight you could see my ribs. Mostly because I was always carrying around a plate of ribs, because that's what I ate: meat. Important lesson: it's one thing to lose so much weight your clothes hang loose, but when you shed so much that your socks don't stay up, it's time to hit the Häagen-Dazs.

[Keene City Councilor Margaret M.] Rice said New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” mantra, coupled with people’s personal attachments in the debate — ranging from family members who have died from smoking-related diseases to those adamant they could not have quit without vaping — makes raising the tobacco age a much more intense issue than other business facing the council.

“I think people really care because they see people being affected
by this in their life, and that matters a lot to them,” she said.
“And on the other side, there are people who really feel strongly
that, (with the) Live Free or Die mentality, that they want their government to be making smart decisions and not necessarily ones that impede their daily activities in a way that they don’t see as being fair.”

Such is the subtle editorializing: LFOD is a "mantra" or a
"mentality". Not really anything to take seriously, just a brain-glitch
that people adopt without much thought.

First of all, I was today years old when I found out pho is
pronounced “fuh.” I was also today years old when I found out New
Hampshire’s state motto “Live Free Or Die” is just some letters of their license plate. We were just discussing at our latest 2BD meeting about how ridiculously PC this world is. How do we have Trump as our leader but Pho Keene is what gets shut down? Blows my mind. This play on words is not only great for business, but a running joke that has been around since my elementary school bus. Remember the Sofa King?

Yes, he of the motto "Our prices are Sofa King low."

The "2BD" author calls New Hampshire the "Alabama of the north."
Ouch.

The Phony Campaign

2019-01-06 Update

Our first phony update of the new year, and the big news is that
Elizabeth Warren has officially launched her "exploratory" campaign. The
betting markets reacted by sending her nomination probability (as
summarized by
Predictwise)
rocketing from 5% to … 7%. Still, that's better than nothing. Also
better than Bernie, Amy Klobuchar, Tim Kaine (a new face on our list
this week), Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and Sherrod Brown. And
better than Hillary Clinton and John Hickenlooper (who both dropped
below our 3% inclusion criterion this week).

Also: the 3.2 million phony Google hits Kamala gained last week really
were ephemeral, vanishing this week. She'll just have to try harder.
Or at least pretend she's trying harder.

This week's results, which return Donald Trump to his rightful leading
phony status:

Elizabeth Warren's announcement came as no surprise to Viking
Pundit, who writes:
Knock me over with a little feather.
He shares the observation of Legal Insurrection: "If
elected, she would be the first person who has committed an ethnic
fraud to hold the presidency." He adds his own (it's short, so
reproduced in full):

When it was advantageous for Warren to be a Republican, she was a Republican.

When it was advantageous for Warren to be a "minority," she was a minority.

When it was advantageous for Warren to be a Massachusetts liberal, she was a Massachusetts liberal.

The Post cites several factors that could explain Warren’s lack of appeal to African-Americans. Her economic populism places too much blame for poverty on capitalism (in effect) and not enough on racism. Two of her rivals are African-American and a third served as vice president to a black president. Her home state is very “white.” Her DNA test revealed she was lying about her ethnicity (the Post puts it more politely).

Each of these factors may be at work. The DNA test may not count for
much in itself, but it does suggest an inauthenticity that could work against her.

The bigger problem, though, is that there’s little in Warren’s persona that is likely to fire up African-Americans. Warren is an academic. She lacks the common touch. She can scold, but she can’t preach.

Like Woodrow Wilson with a skirt?

And I try to avoid linking the same website twice in one post, but
Scott Johnson has an additional useful perspective on
Warren’s kitchen cabinet.
Scott works off the
"cringe-worthy"
Instagram live video where she announced her campaign, accompanied
by pounding back a Michelob Ultra.

“Fight” is the motif of her remarks. She wants to duke it out for us, the little people. Indeed, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, she is one of us. She cracks open a beer to prove it. She can “fight” while guzzling it down. Like the Okies out of Grapes of Wrath, she recalls mama and daddy. She makes no mention of Indian ancestry.

Warren disapproves of pharmaceutical companies making “ginormous profits.” (What about technology companies like Amazon and Apple? I hear they are somewhat profitable too.) Warren also disapproves of for-profit colleges. The common factor is profits; we can extrapolate Warren’s bogeymen to free enterprise generally. She favors consumption over production, so long as she has a hand in distribution.

Incidentally, while we are on the subject of the pharmaceutical
companies, perhaps we should note that their products save lives.
The only thing Elizabeth Warren has ever produced is bogus scholarship.

But about that Michelob Ultra. Shameless "I'm a regular Josephine"
pandering aside,
apparently she later characterized
her preferred brand of suds as the "club soda of beers". At the
Takeout,
Allison Shoemaker
wonders
what she means by that:

I can find no references to Anheuser-Busch’s Michelob Ultra as a particularly effective stain remover, so that’s not why it’s the club soda of beers. I cannot imagine it would serve well as a mixer for vodka, gin, or Scotch, so it’s perhaps safe to assume that that’s not why it’s the club soda of beers. Nor is it non-alcoholic. It does not come in tiny clear bottles. It is not easily confused with tonic. This American light lager cannot be consumed on its own with lime in a highball glass, a presentation that makes it seem as if the drinker is drinking a cocktail while eating all the free food at the happy hour when in reality she has not actually paid for anything.

Oh, so close in that last sentence. But Allison quotes a beer
reviewer who hits the target:

A barely noticeable yellow, barely noticeable grainy smell,
and no taste. This, considering its price point, was rather
disappointing, and maybe even depressing. I have friends who swear
by this, but I don't see the appeal. If you want to get wrecked
drink a wine, if you want a beer, there's so many more out there.
What is the point of this? To act drunk at a fancy party? Ugh...

Off-color, slightly smelly, zero taste, high price point, seemingly
designed to appeal to phonies? A perfect choice for Senator Warren.

Language Log analyzes the linguistic folksiness of the
senator's "I'm gonna get me a beer":
The dagnabbit effect strikes again.
Technically, this is known as the "personal dative". And she seems
to be channelling a different Massachusetts pol:

We're back in John Kerry country again, when the *obviously* elitist Kerry was mocked for his own Personal Dative. Here's the (right-wing) Washington Times shortly after the event:

Mr. Kerry's Ohio hunting adventure started last Saturday, when the senator, campaign entourage in tow, went into a grocery store and asked the owner: "Can I get me a hunting license here?" Even the phraseology sounded staged. Mr. Kerry ordinarily doesn't talk this way, and his language sounded fake and patronizing — as if he was pretending to talk like someone from rural Ohio. [WT, Oct. 22, 2004]

Kerry was subsequently savaged in numerous gleeful right-wing blogs and columns for his inauthentic modeling of "uneducated redneckese", "hick" or "ignorant" speech, or "dumbed-down grammar". Commentators wondered rhetorically, "Is poor grammar something that amounts to reaching out to them-there dumb, gun-loving right-wing rednecks?" Kerry was widely portrayed at the time as having asked "Can I get me a huntin' license here?" (and note the comment to this effect in Warner Todd Huston's tweet in Twitterstorm), actual recordings of Kerry's query at the time clearly confirm that he used the upper register velar nasal. In any case, two weeks later Kerry barely lost Ohio to George W. Bush and with it the election. At least Warren is getting her PD out of the way early, for better or worse.

Maybe she really talks like that at Harvard faculty soirees. Upper
register velar nasal and all. Who
knows?

19) In 2016 and 2017, Sanders made more than $1 million, mostly from book advances and royalties. He received a half-million-dollar advance for this year’s book, Where We Go from Here. (Ironically, back in 1974, Sanders told the Burlington Free Press, “Nobody should earn more than $1 million.”) When the senator received some grief during the 2016 campaign for not releasing his tax returns, he said his wife does the couple’s taxes. Days later, he released his 2014 returns, showing adjusted gross income of $205,271. Despite Sanders’s 1981 statement that he didn’t believe in charities, he and his wife donated $8,350 to charity, according to the return.

How would Bernie put it? "I'm grabbing a beer. No, not Coors Light.
Not Sam Adams. Not Budweiser… Come to think of it, where did you put
the Stolichnaya?"

When officials at the University of Utah invited Joseph R. Biden Jr. to speak there in December, Mr. Biden’s representatives listed a number of requirements for the appearance. His booking firm, Creative Artists Agency, said the school would need to fly Mr. Biden and his aides to Salt Lake City by private plane. It would buy 1,000 copies of his recent memoir from a designated vendor. There would be no insertion of the word “former” before “vice president” in social media promotions. And the speaking fee would be $100,000 — “a reduced rate,” it was explained, for colleges and universities.

Reactions to the op-ed have been mixed. Some have branded Romney a hypocrite for accepting Trump's endorsement in the Utah Senate race and then turning on the president after he was safely elected. Fox News talking head Dan Bongino called him a sell-out, a fraud, a phony, and a fake.

Nobody with memories of the 2012 election will be shocked by people
calling Mitt names. But that last link is pretty classic:

[Romney] is a sell-out. He is a fraud. He is a phony. He is a fake. This
is the kind of guy who has absolutely decimated the Republican
Party. You know, Brian, when there is a museum left to the remnant
of the swamp GOP. And we’re all walking through this museum in 20
or 30 years when there used to be the GOP, exhibit 1 will be Mitt
Romney followed closely by Jeff Flake. You know, Jeff Flake had to
pass the baton of GOP sell-outs. And the race isn’t even over yet.
Romney doesn’t even swear in, I believe, until Thursday. They
couldn’t even wait to pass the baton. What’s even more disgraceful
about this Romney op-ed — and, listen, I spoke positively about
Mitt Romney for a very long time. We ran in the same election
cycle. This is a disgusting move. This is the same guy who went up
to Bedminster, Donald Trump gave him a chance even after Romney
shellacked him, unnecessarily so. Trump gave him a chance. He gave
him another chance having dinner with him in Manhattan, the
President, that is, and interviewed him for jobs. And do you know
what? He endorsed Romney, the president. You want to talk about
character? You big phony fraud fake. You know what? You should have
never taken that endorsement if this is how you felt. This guy is a
disgrace. He's an embarrassment. I’m embarrassed for him, the
people of Utah and anyone who supported this fraud. What a fake.

Now, after training, he knows what to look for — and what to block. He spends his hours scanning online content on behalf of Chinese media companies looking for anything that will provoke the government’s wrath. He knows how to spot code words that obliquely refer to Chinese leaders and scandals, or the memes that touch on subjects the Chinese government doesn’t want people to read about.

One view, which may appear cynical, is that the platforms are worth having, so they should appease us by at least trying to regulate effectively, even though both of us know they won’t really succeed. Circa 2019, I don’t see a better solution. Another view is that we’d be better off with how things were a few years ago, when platform regulation of speech was not such a big issue. After all, we Americans don’t flip out when we learn that Amazon sells copies of “Mein Kampf.”

The problem is that once you learn about what you can’t have — speech regulation that is scalable, consistent and hostile to bad agents — it is hard to get used to that fact. Going forward, we’re likely to see platform companies trying harder and harder, and their critics getting louder and louder.

Elizabeth Warren is grasping. Having failed in her gambit to establish minority status, the 2020 presidential contender is now following the path of her competition.

As Kamala Harris did with the housing crisis, Warren has picked a very real issue — the expense of generic drugs — and decided to address it with a bill that is unlikely to achieve much except gain her personal accolades for “doing something.” And should it pass, it could inhibit efforts to actually resolve the problem, because “something has been done.”

Jibran's article is a good description of the problem, and an
excellent analysis of why Warren's proposals are bad.

Progressives like Warren find it difficult to admit government
intrusions and regulations cause the problems they want to "solve".
Because that would implicitly argue against their "solutions", which
are invariably… more government intrusions and regulations.

I have zero interest in financially supporting any politician, much less ones I find morally unpalatable. Yet Democrats want to force me—and every other American taxpayer—to contribute, as a matter of public policy, to the campaigns of candidates we disagree with. Believe it or not, this might be an even more dangerous assault on free expression than unpleasant tweets directed at CNN anchors.

One of Nancy Pelosi's first projects as the new speaker of the House
will be passing a government overhaul of campaign finance and ethics
rules that would, among other things, "expand voting rights." One of
the new bills—specifics are still cloudy—reportedly would allocate a
pool of taxpayer money to match small-dollar donations 6-to-1, as a
way of encouraging "grass-roots campaigning," according to The
Wall Street Journal.

Politicians of all stripes love the idea of getting "free"
taxpayer money for their campaigns. Note the euphemisms they use to
disguise what they're doing.

Progressives take pride in their reliance on science. They insist that society should be governed according to objectively discovered facts rather than ruled by superstitions, dogmas and baseless fears and fantasies.

I believe that progressives are correct — which is why I’m no progressive. Progressives’ agenda is inconsistent with their boast of being “reality-based.” Progressives unwittingly promote government according superstition, romantic delusions and a tremendous detachment from facts.

And also hubris, Don. You forgot hubris.

[Yes, I'm judging from my Facebook friends, who have endless
suggestions about how private companies—Walmart is a favorite Target
[heh]—should run their enterprises.]

On behalf of everyone in Fergus Falls who was embarrassed by a fake Der Spiegel magazine story about their beloved town, I thought it would be fair to visit the offices of Der Spiegel, which is German for “The Spiegel,” and see what they were like.

The offices are located high in the Alps, in a castle. A sign reading “Anyone not wearing lederhosen, turn back now!” was stuck by the side of the road, but my driver, a dimwitted lad named Horst, explained that it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.

“It’s not like we judge people using stereotypes based on their appearance,” he said. Then he offered to sell me his Alpine hat so I’d “fit in.”

Read on for his encounters with Ilsa Shewolff and Adolph B.
Beethoven.

URLs du Jour

If you pay state and local taxes or have kids in public schools, you will want to check out this recent Cato study on education spending and education results. Looking across the states, the study by Stan Liebowitz and Matthew Kelly found no significant relationship between per-pupil spending and student performance when you adjust for state cost of living.

Spoiler: when you correct for cost of living and demographics, New
Hampshire does, at best, a mediocre job of educating its students.
We can console ourselves (somewhat) by looking across the Salmon
Falls River. The Cato authors have a much different result than
was obtained by the rose-spectacled U.S. News:

There are substantial differences between
our quality rankings and the U.S. News rankings. For example, Maine drops from 6th in
the U.S. News ranking to 49th in the quality ranking. Florida, which ranks 40th in U.S.
News’, jumps to 3rd in our quality ranking

Maine apparently does very well in the
nonlearning components of U.S. News’ rankings; its aggregated NAEP scores would put
it in 24th place, 18 positions lower than its
U.S. News rank. But the aggregated NAEP
scores overstate what its students have
learned; Maine’s quality ranking is a full 25
positions below that. On the 10 achievement tests reported for Maine, its rankings
on those tests are 46th, 45th, 48th, 37th, 41st,
40th, 34th, 40th, 41st, and 23rd. It is astounding that U.S. News could rank Maine as high
as 6th, given the deficient performance of
both its black and white students (the only
two groups reported for Maine) relative to
black and white students in other states. But
since Maine’s student population is about 90
percent white, the aggregated scores bias the
results upward.

In comparison, U.S. News unfairly slagged Florida, which does a
pretty good job by Cato's lights.

Netflix is at the moment being criticized for suppressing an episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, which was critical of Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman. The decision came after complaints from the Saudi government, a monarchy that proposes to continue taking itself seriously. Netflix took the usual corporate weasel route, issuing a statement reading: “We strongly support artistic freedom and removed this episode only in Saudi Arabia after we had received a valid legal request — and to comply with local law.” The statement is false on its face: A company that “strongly supports artistic freedom” would have done something in defense of that freedom.

I think the episode has just been taken down in Saudi Arabia, still
visible in these parts. Still, I wish Netflix were a little more
aggressive in standing up for the rights of willing customers to
watch content critical of their polities.

Millions of Americas will say goodbye to 2018 by setting off a few dozen of their favorite fireworks. What kind of fireworks they'll be able to use, how old they had to be to buy them, and whether they had to smuggle them across state lines are all highly contingent on where they live.

Take age limits, which vary widely across the country. In "Live Free
or Die" New Hampshire, you must be 21 before buying fireworks, while South Carolina law considers 16-year-olds capable of both buying and selling these mini-explosives.

Interesting: NH is an island of prohibition for "recreational"
marijuana in New England, but is fine with letting you buy stuff
that will blow your fingers off. Massachusetts, on the other hand,
is fine with pot, but bans fireworks for even adults.

The City of Keene is asking a Vietnamese restaurant slated to open this spring to change its name.

The restaurant has a lease with the city to operate out of the same building as City Hall.

But its proposed name, Pho Keene Great, has prompted complaints, said City Manager Elizabeth Dragon.

Pho, pronounced “fuh,” is a kind of Vietnamese soup. “Pho Keene” is intended to sound like a profanity, Dragon said.

Maybe someone with a name like "Dragon" shouldn't point fingers at
other peoples' choice of names.

Where's "Free Keene" when you need them? Oh, never mind! They are
all
over
the story, good for them.

Longtime readers of Free Keene will remember Isabelle Rose who made headlines when her Vietnamese food truck began accepting cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. For more than a year, Rose has been working hard on transitioning from food truck to full-service restaurant in downtown Keene! Unfortunately, the people calling themselves the “City of Keene” have decided to make Rose’s life much more difficult.

On Christmas Eve, Rose received a call from the new city manager, Elizabeth Dragon, who in a bid to apparently look more ridiculous than her predecessors, demanded Rose take down the recently-placed sign in the windows of her new location announcing her restaurant was coming soon… right next to city hall.

They have t-shirts too. Amazon link at right, and if you buy one I'm sure some of
the money will wind up with Isabelle Rose..

I want to believe that many Republicans and Democrats are aware of
our fiscal condition and that, deep down, they know that they must
start to legislate responsibly. It would be amazing if they could,
for a change, speak up and take the first steps toward finding a
solution. Sadly, the incentives of politics are so biased toward
fiscal irresponsibility and big government that meaningful reform
will be difficult, borderline miraculous. However, I still have a
little of that Christmas spirit left in me, so I'll allow myself to
dream for the span of one column.

Hey, I have a new Congresscritter, Chris Pappas. Maybe I'll work up
the gumption to ask him what he's going to do about fiscal irresponsibility.

URLs du Jour

It's ridiculous that the United States has 26,000 military personnel in South Korea 65 years after the Korean War, 54,000 in Japan 73 years after World War II, and 64,000 in a dozen European countries 27 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

These countries are perfectly capable of defending themselves. South Korea's economy is around 50 times as big as North Korea's, while Japan and Germany have the world's third and fourth highest GDPs, respectively.

Now if Trump would only make analogous decisions about trade and
drug prohibition and…

Dogs — and animals generally — are among the few things that bridge the partisan divide. Tragedies are a partisan affair. If someone dies in a hurricane or shooting, there’s a mad rush to score political points. Last week, a lovely young woman, Bre Payton, died from a sudden illness, and a bunch of ghouls mocked or celebrated her demise because she was a conservative.

Even babies can be controversial, since babies can touch various nerves, from abortion politics to the apparent scourge of “misgendering” newborns.

But dogs are largely immune to political ugliness. The angriest complaints I get about my dog tweets — from people on both the left and the right — are that I’m wasting apparently scarce resources on dogs when I could be expressing my anger about whatever outrage the complainers demand I be outraged about.

I can't imagine complaining to Jonah about anything, other than
perhaps not being prolific enough.

Now, Romney’s central grievances about Trump’s character are fair enough. But for some of us, the beatification of the presidency—always a problem, but a particularly unhealthy one since 2008—is off-putting, as well.

“To a great degree,” Romney writes, “a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow ‘our better angels.’” Personal morality matters because it reflects the temperament and choices of the people running government. The president isn’t our Pope, however. And political “unity” has always been a vacuous and destructive concept. Elected officials don’t define our national, much less personal, character. And if you’re searching for enlightenment in politics, you should probably find a better religion.

David's solid point: try not to let criticizing Trump's character
make you buy into left-wing criticism of his policies.

Mitt Romney, incoming senator for Utah and follower of Joseph Smith, lectured the nation in an op-ed Tuesday on the need to reject morally flawed leaders.

The man who has devoted his life to the teachings of a con artist encouraged the nation to examine its leaders to see whether they are worthy of our devotion and respect.

"A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect," wrote the man who follows Joseph Smith, a false prophet, notorious polygamist, and scam artist. He pointed out that the president hasn't shown himself to be honest or forthcoming in his dealings with opponents and other countries, while Joseph Smith's own prophecies failed to come true over and over again, and while the Mormon Church continues to deceive its members by covering up its past.

That's … pretty hard-hitting.

Perhaps you remember the founding of "603 and Me" last year?

Yeah, me neither. But AP reports that
603 and Me Celebrates Significant Milestones.
That would be their first anniversary. Their
proclaimed goal
is "to let others outside of our state recognize that New Hampshire
is a terrific place to enjoy life throughout one’s career, both
living and working in a pleasant environment."

Ah, but why are we seeing this news?

Going forward, 603 and Me will also work with local legislators to
have the State adopt the slogan, “New Hampshire – America’s
Best-Kept Secret”. In doing so, 603 and Me aims to not replace the
State’s popular “Live Free or Die” motto, but instead highlighting to others that New Hampshire is the place to be.

Yeah, that's what we need, a slogan.

At Forbes, Michael del Castillo looks at
Bitcoin’s
Last Gunslinger. That would be Erik Voorhees, who has managed to
avoid jail. It's an interesting story, and…

To more seriously pursue his ever-strengthening beliefs that
government—and banking—power should be limited, Voorhees picked up
stakes and moved to New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state. There he worked with the Free State Project, a long-term effort to build a society with as little government meddling as possible, and met Keith Ammon, a rising local politician. In May 2011 Ammon introduced Voorhees to bitcoin, which unlike the pine cones of his youth was limited in supply and unlike the U.S. dollar was not minted by a government.

I don't know if Erik still lives in New Hampshire, but good luck to
him wherever he is.

MLK@UNH 2019

It's that time of year when we look at what the University Near Here
has
planned
for Martin Luther King Day.

Well, not the actual day, January 21. The campus is closed that day, Spring Semester doesn't begin
until January 22. Instead, the festivities start on January 30, and
continue through (I am not making this up) through April. We'll look at
some of them.

Sometimes I wonder if the folks in charge have a bingo cage with
buzzwords and hackneyed phrases written on the balls. Every year, they
pick five or six balls at random and attempt to use them all while
filling in the blank:
"This year's tribute to MLK will focus on _____."

This year gives us:

This year's tribute to MLK will focus on the use of dialogue to help us engage in a culture of compassion and awaken us to solidarity and liberation

Check. It's the usual gaseous, vague, essentially meaningless prose.
The balls go back in the cage for next year.

But what's actually happening?

The first speaker is… not bad, actually. C.L. Lindsay III, on "Freedom
of Speech".

Attorney C.L. Lindsay III left his law practice in 1998 and founded the
Coalition for Student & Academic Rights (CO-STAR), a non-profit that assists students with their legal problems, free-of-charge. Lindsay is a nationally recognized expert and leader in the field of student rights and academic freedom. He received his J.D. from the Univ of Michigan and continues to teach Law and Literature at the Univ. of Pennsylvania.

Somewhat surprisingly, a white guy. The CO-STAR site is
here; Lindsay's
personal site is
here. Apparently, his lectures are
pretty funny, using
"trademark action figure pictures to illustrate his points".

Students and individual free speech rights with an emphasis in online speech

Invited outside speakers and balancing free speech with safety and other institutional concerns

Public forum speech and profanity rules and time place and manner restrictions

Free Speech vs. Free From Consequences

I have quibbles!

Are there really "myriad"
exceptions to protected speech?
According to current jurisprudence, not
really. More like a handful.

The "balancing free speech with safety" issue is (indeed) hot right now,
but only because universities have used it as an excuse to charge
onerous "security fees" on "controversial" speakers (i.e.,
likely to arouse the ire of violent left-wingers). That didn't work out
well for the
University
of Washington, which tried to play this game with the College
Republicans, only to wind up paying $122,500 in legal fees.

And with respect to "Free Speech vs. Free From Consequences": that can
be problematic too. Nobody argues that speech can be, or even should be,
free from "consequences". If you use your freedom of speech to proclaim
the wisdom of
Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, there will be at least one consequence. Namely, that
I will consider you to be an idiot.

So "Free Speech vs. Free From Consequences" isn't really the issue.
Pretending that it is borders on fatuity.

On February 9, there's the "MLK Annual Day of Service", billed as "a
great way to show those in need that you care."

I'm kind of tired of people throwing the "virtue-signalling" label at
others, but I can't come up with a better description in this case.
Your important goal is not simply to help out the needy, but to
show them that you care.

And then on February 15: A Cappella performances! It's time again to
spin the bingo
cage of catchphrases:

Several A Cappella groups have organized a special "Spring Inclusion" event with a wide variety of songs that will hopefully widen our circles and invite our minds to reflect on new ways to view our community and the people around us.

Hm. If you widen a circle, don't you get an ellipse? Even if you do so
"hopefully"?

And I wonder what
it means to view both "our community" and "the people around us".
A thoughtless redundancy, or a meaningful distinction? I fear we shall
never know for sure.

Based on the best selling book, this is the story of Starr Carter who lives in two worlds, a poor black neighborhood and a predominantly white prep school. The uneasy balance is thrown when her friend is killed by a police officer.

Trivia: The title is (allegedly) based on the rap artist Tupac Shakur who had a
"THUG LIFE" tattoo, which he alleged was an acronym for "The Hate U Give
Little Infants F***s Everything". The rating is PG-13, so they don't
play up that last part.

As The Hate U Give reached its climax, I had to reach down to the floor. There it was, right down there with the soda residue and the spilled popcorn: My jaw. Did I really just see a Black Lives Matter movie, in which an unarmed black youth is shot and killed by a white cop, build up to a scene in which a black cop explains what goes through the mind of a police officer in such a situation, when a suspect repeatedly disobeys lawful commands, and explains that he would have shot the guy too? This film is going to make Sheriff David Clarke jump out of his seat and cheer.

That's an "NRPlus" article. If you're nonNRplussed, you'll have to take
my word for it. But it seems a surprisingly good choice for UNH.

The main speaker shows up on February 26, Leah Penniman:

Leah Penniman, founding co-director of Soul Fire Farm, is author of the book "Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation of the Land" is the scheduled speaker for this year's MLK Tribute. Leah has been farming since 1996 and teaching since 2002. The work of Leah and Soul Fire Farm has been recognized by Omega Sustainability Leadership Award, Presidential Award for Science Teaching, and others. Soul Fire Farm, is committed to ending racism and injustice within our food system. Penniman is part of a global network of farmers working to increase farmland stewardship by people of color, and ending food apartheid. More about the book

Food apartheid? Ooh! Sounds like tendentious bullshit! Gustavo
Arellano wrote in Reason a couple years back about the movement:

The contemporary progressive food philosophy, best epitomized on the
national level by Michelle Obama's Let's Move! program, is based on the
notion that the country's fat, diabetic, unhealthy working classes are
simply too derelict to make informed food choices. That decades of
corporate greed have led to so-called "food deserts" and "food
apartheid," in which chain restaurants and liquor stores are blighting
neighborhoods and serving up what ["fusion taco artist" Roy] Choi described as "corrosive chemical waste." That salvation lies only in going back to the land—putting farmers markets in low-income neighborhoods and promoting organic, sustainable foodways from elementary school through adulthood.

I wouldn't say that Leah is a food nazi, but I'd have to attend her talk
to find out and… I'm not gonna.

From the tendentious to the weird/tedious, March 2 brings "The Human
Library" (to the local high school, not UNH):

The Human Library Project is a one-day event offering the opportunity
for face-to-face conversations that challenge sterotyping and prejudice.
Its a place where real people are "books", as they "loan" their stories
and experiences to listeners. Difficult questions are expected,
appreciated and answered in the moment. Come and sit with your "book"
and discover paths to a more peaceful world.

Listen to UNH students tell their stories and share their experiences as
they navigate the transition and terrain from high school to college and
onward to internships, graduate studies and careers.

Fine, but note the (as always) inflated language, using 31 words to say
something that could equally have been done with 7:
"UNH students with disabilities tell their stories."

From January 24 to March 31, there's an exhibit at the UNH Art Gallery:

Yoav Horesh's Aftermath is a selection of photographs made in suicide bombing sites in Israel after the places have been hastily repaired and the destruction has been erased not only from the landscape, but also from the collective memory. In an increasingly desensitized environment of war imagery, we are hardly ever challenged to think about the aftermath.

I'd guess that Israelis probably don't need any extra reminders of
suicide bombings, but that's just a guess.

And another extended event, April 1-22: the "21 Day Racial Equity Habit
Building Challenge".

The 21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge was originally developed by Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr. and Debby Irving and has been adapted by Food Solutions New England with support from the Interaction Institute for Social Change. The challenge consists of daily email prompts with resources. It is designed to create dedicated time and space to build more effective social justice habits, particularly those dealing with issues of race, power, privilege, and leadership.

It creates time and space. A fuller description can be found at
the "Food Solutions New England" website
here;
it has the "Strident Earnestness" dial turned up to 11:

The origins of our current industrial food system can be found, not just in the pursuit of food security and feeding of the world, but also in the consolidation and inequitable distribution of economic and political power, land, and resources, going back centuries: a legacy that includes stolen land, lives, and labor. And it is present today here and across the country, in our federal policies, and in the astonishing consolidation of money, power and control over the very things that give us life – our soil, our water, our labor, the food we eat every day.

Uh huh. Or, if you live in Venezuela, the food
you
don't eat
every day. Somehow I doubt if the "Food Solutions" people have a firm
grasp on what feeds the world and
what
doesn't.

Some Graphs

Back in 2016, I made an early New Year's resolution to blog more
diligently. This was unusual, in that it was actually successful.
Since December 2016, I've managed to blog for 738 consecutive days. Woo!
I'll try to keep going in 2019.

There's twelve more months of data on the chart
showing the monthly blog posts since Pun
Salad's birth in February 2005:
(Hat tip: the Chart::Gnuplot
Perl module)

Once a geek develops a hammer, it's tough to stop finding nails to pound.
Here's an updated chart on my book reading; you can tell that I've been
trying to read more over the past few years:

And movies watched since 2004…

For the curious: My 2018 book list is
here;
my 2018 movie list is
here.

It's great to make people more aware of bad mental habits and encourage better ones, as many people have done on LessWrong. The way we deal with weak thinking is, however, like how people dealt with depression before the development of effective anti-depressants:

Clinical depression was only marginally treatable.

It was seen as a crippling character flaw, weakness, or sin.

Admitting you had it could result in losing your job and/or friends.

Treatment was not covered by insurance.

Therapy was usually analytic or behavioral and not very effective.

People thus went to great mental effort not to admit, even to themselves, having depression or any other mental illness.

I've been having (mostly inchoate) thoughts in the same vein for a
while: consider the population distribution of measures of human
mental behavior: there will always be people several sigma away from (above
or below) the mean on each measure.

Yet we label some of those indicators as mental
illness, and
hence absolve the holder of responsibility for them.

Conversely, we treat other of those indicators as "character
flaws" something
people are "responsible" for, and shower them with praise or blame,
as appropriate.

Deciding which is which? Largely up to the folks that write the
DSM.
In other words, politics.

That seems inapt. But I have a difficult time coming up with
anything better.

Perhaps this strikes you as something less than a stop-the-presses revelation. The internet, after all, has been expanding and accelerating for the past 25 years. Why should 2018 have been any different?

Yet last year, when the Federal Communications Commission moved to repeal the Obama administration’s “Net Neutrality” rule, much of the liberal establishment went berserk. Many in the media were sure the change would mean the “end of the internet as we know it.” A lavish online campaign backed by dozens of organizations issued a “Red Alert,” warning that if the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai overturned the Obama regulations, it would “give the big cable companies control over what we see and do online” and “allow widespread throttling, blocking, censorship, and extra fees.” A New York Times business journalist bewailed the coming demise of the internet — undoing net neutrality, he wrote, “would be the final pillow in its face.” Other tech analysts were even more caustic. Nilay Patel, the editor of The Verge, proclaimed that with net neutrality gone, the internet was doomed. (“Doomed” wasn’t the word he used.)

You can click over to find out the word he used, but I bet you can
guess.

"Disaster continues to fail to strike" isn't the most gripping
headline, but is it too much to ask to be reminded that the
doomsayers, with their itchy regulatory trigger fingers, were
wrong?

At Cato, Jeffrey Miron notes how
Fentanyl
Test Strips exemplify how drug prohibition makes Your Federal
Government do some bizarre things. Briefly, the test strips can save
lives, but … guess what, the government opposes their distribution.
Miron outlines the "logic" involved:

The government’s position, therefore, is that

we have to outlaw drugs because people are not rational enough to use them safely;

if prohibition makes it difficult for users to determine potency and quality, that is unfortunate;

but if users respond to this uncertainty by taking steps that reduce the risks, we cannot trust them to do that since they might not get it exactly right.

"The only thing libertarian about our state is the motto," Greg
Raymond, 30, a ski resort server in Whitefield told The
Boston Globe. "Now it’s become an embarrassing motto: 'Live free
or die, but don't touch that plant.'"

Disclaimers:
Unquoted opinions expressed herein are solely those of the
blogger.

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